This is to be one of those columns that makes the writer faintly wish there wasn’t an internet. It would be one thing merely in print — ephemeral, swiftly forgotten, to be stumbled across only by like-minded individuals en route from Charles Moore to Taki — but online I fear there may be sniggering. ‘What planet is he on?’ they will be asking on Twitter, but then, I suppose, they always are.
The fact is, there’s been a question preying on my mind these last few weeks and I’m going to be bold, and ask it. You may snigger, you may mock and you may sneer, but that won’t make my question any less valid. So here goes. I’ll be nearly 40 in a couple of years. And I keep being told that I live a life of relative privilege. So. Why the hell don’t any of my friends own holiday homes?
OK, so that’s not strictly true. My colleague Matthew Parris, I have been reading, has recently bought a windowless cavern under a dusty Spanish desert and put a bathroom in it. This should be acknowledged, albeit with a degree of envy I’ll leave entirely up to you. But Matthew, while a friend, is not of my generation. And among my peers? Nothing. Not a gîte, not a chalet, not a dacha, not a but’n’ben or a lodge. No Cornish beachhouses, no Ibiza villas, no converted French barns, no enviable farmhouses of Cotswold stone in which to be mocked for having a kitchen supper. None of that at all.
This isn’t a whine. It sounds like a whine, right? But it isn’t one. A few of my peers and relatives do, in fact, have various retreats at their disposal, via parents, and are sometimes kind enough to put them at mine.
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