Seduced, Beaten, Spent

More things you must have.

“Here, your favourite magazine,” Mrs. Pop said as she thrust the latest glistering incarnation of the Financial Times supplement How To Spend It towards my shaking hands. Some months I toss it disdainfully into the recycling pile. Other months, I can’t resist. The desire to feel morally superior to the overwhelmingly wealthy is just too great. That’s right, this magazine exists to help me feel good about myself.

As I started to read the February 11 edition, I became more convinced than ever that it’s entirely written for my amusement. It’s a subtle but vicious parody, inventing people that could not possibly exist in the real world, nor survive without having their heads kicked in by the indignant normal folk they happen to bump into. For it’s just not conceivable that an actual human being, “executive chef” Alain Ducasse, say, would go public with news that “the best gift I’ve given recently was a gold and diamond ring from Lorenz Bäumer for my wife, Gwenaelle, to celebrate the birth of our son Arzhel”.

Alain explains with a hint of apology that the son’s name “is from Brittany”, though that’s not going to stop Arzhel’s future school yard contemporaries from wilfully mis-pronouncing his moniker, especially if he’s anything like his old man and his penchant for bragging about having picked up stuff like “a folding tea-ceremony table from a gallery called Mitate in Tokyo”.

Another surely made up character is interior architect Philippa Thorp, who according to a piece by Katrina Burroughs on walk-in closets, asserts that “bespoke dressing rooms have become indispensable to today’s high-fliers”. But does this mean that if a band of communist revolutionaries planned to overthrow capitalism, all they’d have to do is destroy bespoke dressing rooms? Without them, the high-fliers would presumably just dissolve into crumbs, as though slain by Buffy. Well, now I know where to start if I ever feel oppressed enough by reading How To Spend It to take to the closets with a grudge and a flaming bottle filled with gasoline.

Then, something strange happened. I was profoundly disappointed to find myself genuinely interested in the next two pieces – one about the Icon Sheene motor cycle (£107,000), and the next about limited edition signature wristwatches and how they increase in value. Argh, they’re sucking me in! I wanna motor bike named after Barry Sheene! I wanna watch with a replicated Diego Maradona autograph! See, all it takes is some half-decent journalism without any pretentious twattery and they’re bringing out the latent materialist in the massed stay-at-home dad readership.

Shoes: an absolute must for the chic working woman

Then came an article about a philanthropist and a sculptor bringing public art to Hyde Park while raising funds for a children’s educational centre. I could find fault in all that, if I was going to be an ideological purist bore, but I can’t be arsed. I’m getting too old. Well done, rich chappies – doubly good cause. By the time I reached a piece proclaiming “menswear-influenced lace-ups are becoming the footwear of choice for the chic working woman”, I’d lost the will to resist.

Hey, I’m walking the feminist walk here, bringing up the kids for my chic working woman, and I say it’s her right to wear what the hell she likes on her feet, even a £435 pair of Rupert Sanderson patent Joyce brogues, or some 300-quid Fratelli Rosetti perforated suede Derbys. Which sounds more like a line from an elegiac tribute to an Italian football hooligan’s assault on a grim east Midlands town than a shoe, but what do I know? I’m just the drooling reader, dreaming of decadent excess and the day when, like founder and chief executive of Yoox Group, Federico Marchetti, I’m interviewed by Vanessa Friedman, and I can tell her about a floating fish restaurant called Jumet that “is so secret it doesn’t have a landline, just a mobile-phone number that you need to know”.

Of course a floating restaurant doesn’t have a fucking landline, you cock. Tsk, he may manage 23 luxury-brand online stores valued at €500 million, and he may have Jumet’s mobile number, but you can’t just go out and buy brains, eh?