Real life | 24 May 2018

‘What a fabulous tan, where did you get it? said one of my fellow lunch guests as we entered the women’s powder room of a Mayfair hotel.

I get this a lot. I want to talk about where I have wintered, or summered, or springed, because although I am poor I am lucky enough to mix with people who are not, and I love people who are not. I will defend them to the death.

The poorer I get, the more capitalist I become. I can trace my attraction to Trump directly along the lines of my diminishing bank account and mounting credit card bills.

I think it is to do with the fact that when one encounters poverty it is so unutterably awful that one can bear it only by taking refuge in the knowledge that somewhere else there are people who are comfortable, some fabulously so. If I can’t have money, please God let someone else have it.

Socialism, the idea that everyone is going to be like me, is so abhorrent that I am just about made sick to my stomach by it.

Oh, but you have horses, people say to me, so you must be rich. Yes, that’s right. I have horses. I get up every day at 7 a.m. and drive to a nearby field I rent where I tend to my horses before returning home to wrestle with my wreck of a house. And in the evening I drive back to the field and see to the horses again. If that makes me rich, so be it. I am rich in the sense that, despite everything, I love my life.

But in terms of money, not so much. The horses get shoes when my shoes are falling to bits.