Three problems with wealth

"You couldn't just roll back that duvet for me, darling, could you...?"

Reflections on a week in an otherwise palatial holiday home:

• Should locking up really take this long? Even allowing for the fact that I’m finding my way around here, I have to walk 100 yards and hit something like 20 switches before going to bed. Then maybe another 50 yards to make sure I’ve killed all those cute little exterior lights too. My own house is never more than four switches and 20 yards from total darkness. I win.
•  The unspoken cost of being able to say you own a seven-bedroom house. Downstairs, we sit in rooms with 10ft between floor and ceiling. Upstairs, we walk around like Quasimodo to avoid concussion. If this was your idea, you’re nuts: if it was a condition imposed by the planning people, someone at Town Hall is laughing at you.
• How’s it feel having one of your primary status symbols at the mercy of near-microscopic organisms? All the surreptitious pees in Middle England can’t spoil a swimming pool like algae can. Aquamarine-blue one minute, toxic-spill green the next and a week of pain ahead. Say this for the rainwater that pools on my flat-roof bathroom; at least it’s always gin-clear.

The new stigma – for ‘single parent’, read ‘single car’

I’m telling my mother’s carer how swift is the train service from East Anglia to the north-east and how I wouldn’t think of using our car, even if my wife didn’t need it while I’m away.

The carer actually stops what she’s doing and turns towards me. “So you just have the one car, then?” she asks.

I don’t know whether to feel very, very ‘green’ or very, very poor.

Bingo! Mood marred in one…

Image via Wikipedia

A cold, dank January day finally proves its worth as we pull up in the promenade car park.

Somewhere out there, a flat, grey sea and grey sky blend seamlessly on the horizon, lending the view a spectral, eery air we’ve never known before at this place, as if something bad has either just happened or is just about to. It is an empty yet compelling vista.

It is then that we make our biggest mistake.

We open the car doors.

“White one and six; sixteen,” the tannoy from a nearby arcade informs us. “Blue four and five; forty-five…”

Welcome to Hunstanton. Nature and naff in perfect harmony.