Flying First Class is all very well, but in the end, it's still public transport.
So spare a thought, please, for the absurdly rich. Not the merely well off, who get to pay ten times the price to sit in the front of the plane and get a glass of sour, fizzy wine. They still have to eat their congealing steak with a plastic knife and fork, and their chances of sitting next to a fat, flatulent foreigner with bad breath and an attitude to match is correspondingly (and satisfyingly, to the rest of us) high. No, not those poor, misguided, souls. If you're going to envy anyone, how about envying the people they envy; the bloated plutocrats, the absolutely rolling-in-it, the mind-bogglingly wealthy. The owners of that ultimate liability: the private jet. Consider their problems. Not the money: money they've got. Buckets of the stuff. Stolen, most of it. No, it's the constant hassle. The eye-popping. kniption-inducing, impotent frustration of the thing. Having to put up with wild-eyed madmen in oily overalls clambering about the innards of their (frequently-malfunctioning) million-dollar toys, to emerge clutching what looks like a bolt, and explaining with po-faced glee that this, the culprit, costs more than the gross national product of Guam. And that in any case the makers don't make them any more. Finding out that the caviar's gone rancid. Running out of the '83 Roederer Cristal, and having to settle for the vastly inferior '84. Horrid, horrid. horrid. Now, who do you think they envy? They envy you, that's who. You, who can get on an AirAsia flight, sit peacefully for an hour or so, and then get off again. You're exactly where you wanted to be, you never have to think about that plane again, and it all cost you less than a decent lunch. The rich, as someone once pointed out, are different from you and me. They have more money. They certainly don't have more sense.
So spare a thought, please, for the absurdly rich. Not the merely well off, who get to pay ten times the price to sit in the front of the plane and get a glass of sour, fizzy wine. They still have to eat their congealing steak with a plastic knife and fork, and their chances of sitting next to a fat, flatulent foreigner with bad breath and an attitude to match is correspondingly (and satisfyingly, to the rest of us) high. No, not those poor, misguided, souls. If you're going to envy anyone, how about envying the people they envy; the bloated plutocrats, the absolutely rolling-in-it, the mind-bogglingly wealthy. The owners of that ultimate liability: the private jet. Consider their problems. Not the money: money they've got. Buckets of the stuff. Stolen, most of it. No, it's the constant hassle. The eye-popping. kniption-inducing, impotent frustration of the thing. Having to put up with wild-eyed madmen in oily overalls clambering about the innards of their (frequently-malfunctioning) million-dollar toys, to emerge clutching what looks like a bolt, and explaining with po-faced glee that this, the culprit, costs more than the gross national product of Guam. And that in any case the makers don't make them any more. Finding out that the caviar's gone rancid. Running out of the '83 Roederer Cristal, and having to settle for the vastly inferior '84. Horrid, horrid. horrid. Now, who do you think they envy? They envy you, that's who. You, who can get on an AirAsia flight, sit peacefully for an hour or so, and then get off again. You're exactly where you wanted to be, you never have to think about that plane again, and it all cost you less than a decent lunch. The rich, as someone once pointed out, are different from you and me. They have more money. They certainly don't have more sense.