Is it really so wretched being rich?

Eat with the rich but play with the poor.

"The wretchedness of being rich is that you have to live with rich people," said Logan Pearsall Smith nearly a century ago. "Eat with the rich," he added, "but go to play with the poor, who are capable of joy." Joylessness, of course, wrote Craig Brown in the Daily Mail, is not confined to the rich, though wealth makes it more likely. Take summer holidays. "If you are a billionaire, an unspoken rule seems to oblige you to buy a big yacht, then to moor it within shouting distance of other billionaires, many of them with even bigger yachts."

An example, though he may not yet be a billionaire, is Simon Cowell. According to Cowell's new biography, he charters, for £2m a month, a 193ft yacht with a crew of 14. He then sails it, says Brown, "to a stretch of sea in the Grenadines, which other moguls, every bit as gruesome Topshop's Philip Green, James Murdoch, Rupert Murdoch, David Geffen and Carphone Warehouse's Charlie Dunstone have already turned into a sort of nautical campsite".

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