By the standards of the middle classes we are not rich at all but it is astonishing how well free trade lets us live. Last night I ate a plate of mussels for supper, and then some bread and cheese with a half bottle of Gevrey Chambertin, picked up in Totnes. Then I set a fire in the living room, put some Liszt on the CD player,and sat for a long time listening and watching with a small glass of brandy. When the music had finished and the fire was moribund I read a little from a second-hand Milton (a nicely bound book that had been a fifth-form prize for sight-reading at a girls’ school in 1935).
I can’t see how any amount of money could have improved this experience.
I know it is a very materialistic form of bliss; but it is astonishing what wonderful things we can get in the Western world, and for how little money. Apart from the fire — and I didn’t have to chop the wood — I suppose that all my pleasures cost me about £20, including the CD, whose cost should be amortised for the rest of my life. A hundred years ago much of this would have been beyond anyone less than superlatively rich (as, on a global scale, I am).
An Edwardian millionaire could have drunk better wine; his book might have been more beautifully bound, though hardly better printed. He would have missed the pleasure of setting his own fire; and to get a private performance of Liszt to that standard, he’d have had to have been a Wittgenstein, and got a relative to play.
and the cost of relaying all of this to us would have be quite a bit higher.