How to spend it: Antiques
By the Marquis
I love Money. I love to have it, I love to spend it, I love to watch other people spend it, I love to watch other people spend it on me, I love to watch myself spend it on other people. I love most of all the way it moves. I remember as a child, glassy-eyed, watching fleets of lorries embark from those monumental warehouses that dot the M1, branded with the names of electronics distributors or supermarkets or high end chocolatiers, and thinking, ‘There goes Money.’
Later I discovered that houses too can be a form of Money, and certain roads in Primrose Hill or Portobello were suddenly transformed; in those long, low corridors of stucco-facades was trapped billions and billions of pounds worth of holidays and pet tarantulas and dinners and candy floss and yachts to strange countries from which one returns with a bird of Paradise mounted firmly to the shoulder.
And I feel the same now, still get a little dizzy passing through Canary Wharf on the DLR thinking just how much Money exists, how quietly it grows like a tuberous vegetable and coils about itself, how high it has been piled up, how many times over my life could be bought and sold - and how vanishingly small a portion of all that Money belongs to me.
Which is why when I saw a young man had spent nigh-on £300 on a set of tea cups, not one of which would fetch more than £5 at Oxfam, my heart lurched into my stomach. ‘There goes Money,’ I thought, there goes Money, vanishing into the rear view mirror, like so many lorries fleeing the wrong way down the M1.
Whether he has his own sentimental reasons for this (the brand, Denby, is one of the older British potteries, and he is lending some much-needed support to these Red Squirrels of crockery, apparently on the brink of closing) is irrelevant. All that matters is this; I love Money. I love Money and I hate to see it wasted. Worse still, in the replies to his post, you will find no end of other comrades of his, volunteering to fritter away their pensions on the same fourth-rate charity shop tea sets.
This cannot stand. Money, the unit with which we count possibility, is too beautiful a thing for just anyone to be allowed to throw it hither-and-thither. Let someone who knows what they’re doing take the rudder. Me. That what happened that day should never happen again, I here present a brief guide for a readership I imagine to be roughly as wealthy as myself, on how to spend what little you can spare on homeware and furniture to improve your living quarters. Within a year you could, if you listen closely, put aside £100 a month, and have a little bit of cunning, have a better decorated house than your parents’ wealthiest friends. So let us give Money its due.
