PARADISE LUST. HAPPY TO BE ON AN ISLAND IN THE SUN. RICHARD BRANSON'S RETREAT. BUTLINS FOR STUPID PEOPLE

The telly is profiling the super rich at the moment;  there is a great, angry show on one of the outlets, The SuperRich and Us,  there has been the exposure of the unspeakable and vile TatlerFolk, who should all be summarily executed and PBC 2's carefully restricted view of Richard Branson's Caribbean island, Nekker, Billionaire's Paradise, despite all the inevitable fawning, 

reveals him to be a cheap and not very bright narcissist and a bit of a snorting bully.  

Oh, mr ishmael, he can't be stupid, look at all the money he's made, plus Tubular Bells.  Right, that's me told. Robert Maxwell, Alan Sugar, Rupert Murdoch, you are my sunshine, all of you.

When I was in business, myself, retailing furniture into prosperous houses, I would always pay attention to anything the customer chose to say to me, I was always curious. Some were self-made businessfolk, engineers from the Back Country, fishmongers from the Cotswolds. Many were senior health professionals grown  wealthy in private practice.  I sold a beautiful, extravagant five-mirrored dressing chest,

It was like this but much more grand  and florid.

one time, to a regular customer, an anaesthetist, and in the shop she said to her brat of a 12 year old daughter, for whom she had made the purchase - £1250 - Now, darling, mr ishmael has gone to some trouble to find us this and it just so matches your other bedroom furniture,  you will take good care of it because it's quite a lot of money........Oh, mother, it's only what you make in a morning.  Well, not every morning, darling. 

Another time, a brain surgeon at the Queen Elizabeth, wanting to buy a big fuck off compactum wardrobe went into one of those spiv spiels, Oh, come,we are all men of the world, surely you can lose the VAT. For cash.  We're talking cash here. Pound notes. There weren't any pound notes, then, but never mind, I assumed he knew his neural pathways better than he knew his currency-argot.

 I happened to have a couple of grand in my back pocket. Cash, I said, showing it to him, I have enough cash for today, thank you, and anyway, cash sales have to go through the books, too, whaddayathink I am, a fucking crook, like you, and where do you suppose your NHS salary comes from, if it's not from VAT, eh? I fired a round of fucks into him and off he went, a sadder and a wiser man; he came back though, muted, and bought the wardrobe, 'sany number of brain surgeons around, but this wardrobe - it had been a bishop's - was the only one in the world.

Another time, I bought  another compactum wardrobe - I restored and sold  loads of them - at auction, one night, bought it for a song, don't know why, nobody wanted it; it was what the trade calls Edwardian, that fabulous inlaid mahogany, unshowy, with a flat pediment, simple but high quality brassware, masculine, with beautiful grains and colours. 

Anyway, I had this, one like this,  in the shop for ages, at £450 and I couldn't sell it but I liked it so much that I took it home. And for about a year, I used to wake up and look at this thing, in awe. I had sold hundreds of flashy Victorian wardrobes but these turn-of-the-century pieces were and still are, in terms of materials, design and cabinet-makers skills, a special case;  the Italians used to love this stuff, shipping it out by the tonne.   Time came, anyway,  that I was moving house, myself;  I'll just drop this back in the shop, I thought, until we're settled-in at the new place.  The piece still had it's £450 price ticket on and when I put it in the shop I just thought, maybe it's too cheap and so I squeezeed a 1 in front of the 450 and fuck me, it sold within ten minutes. Woman walked into the shop and said, can you deliver that?  Sure can. Right, she said, taking out her cheque book, how much is it?

When we delivered it, to a Victorian millionaire's  mansion in Farquahar Road, Edgbaston, I realised that these people had better things to do than involve me in a tax fiddle, money wasn't their thing, they already had money; fine things, rare, unusual, preferably unique, that was their thing. And sitting in their then two million pounds house, this would have been cheap at twice the price. The barrowboy surgeon, however, he was still on the make, probably always will be, although he will always, also,  think twice about saying Can we lose the tax; by we, he meant me, he meant me going to prison, cheeky cunt.

The are not all like him, forever holding their hands out, scowling;  I dealt with scores of them and some were just like you and I but there were enough of them, like him, to give his game a bad name.

My business life persuaded me that for most of us, despite the efforts of our masters to persuade us otherwise, money isn't actually everything.  

The Branson show, however, the existence and celebrity of a prat like Richard Branson, provides a counterpoint;  depressing, vulgar and trashy the super rich, whilst depriving so many of what they need have nothing that I want.

In addition to running late and overcrowded trains, Beardy also makes a packet from hiring his island home to stupid arseholes who would disgrace Butlins and this show took a look at them and their costly experence in Paradise. Branson always walks and talks flash insouciance, doesn't he? Nobody loves the rich, apart, maybe, from themselves and Beardy's chums seem to be arseholes, like himself, chancers, like Tony and Imelda, who knighted him after a free holiday in his island shithole.  

This is all free, Richard, right?  
I mean everything?
Knighthoods don't come cheap, y'know.
I may be a pretty, straightguy 
but I still have to turn a profit.

And, look, I simply say,
Imelda, she doesn't come cheap.

Beardy has, in pride of place in his beach hut, a letter from Diana Spencer-Battenberg, a knob-sucking-promissory-note, a  paean to his generosity, in letting her, her brats and her team - servants paid for by us - crash-out there, she hadn't met the al Fayeds at that point.  Beardy simpers, in his wet voice, that it was just perfect for Diana, 

took the pressure off, and for the kids, too, took the pressure off princes Gormless and Hooligan, because they were people like him, people like Beardy, in the public eye, what they need and deserve is a ShitIsle in the sun, away from the rest of us, who make their lives a misery. And that's what he's got, palm trees, lizards and a poxy wee beach, which employs a handful of slaves-with-JCBs from a neighbouring island, desperately trying to stop the sands slipping into the sea. 

This portrait of  the mad aviator on his Caribbean home did him  no favours, even relaxed, fending-off no questions about VirginSpace or his shitty train service  and half-pissed, even on his own turf he looks and sounds shifty and unwholesome. 

No, no (giggles wetly), 
it's just a metaphor for me pissing on you.

The white staff,  all youngish, all prettyish, all unfathomably stupid and starstruck, 

live-in on Party Island, within earshot of their  master's wet voice, the better to serve him, 'cos that's wot Richard needs, opined some pimply rentboy, cos he's so busy an' works so hard;  the black folks  are boated-in, daily to make the beds, haul the shit, chop the wood and dig the sand;  Richard allows them a wee party of their own, now and again, a glass of red wine and a jump in  Branson's ocean; they must think they've died and gone to Heaven, jumping in the sea, eh? Caribbeans?

Another Beardy Bimbo,
they all look like her, his Apartheid inner sanctum.

Looking uncomfortably like a pimp, Biggles  insisted that not only should his staff members drink with paying visitors but have what he called relationships with them, boasting, with a snort, that he had sacked, after two days, a manager who had suggested otherwise.  

Branson's accountant, above, relaxes by leting his customers nibble  sushi off her warm body, it's really career-expanding, she pouts, to have soy sauce licked out of my bellybutton. 
Honest, not invent.

Said visitors appeared to consist, on this occasion,  of older, rich women, drooling over the Watersports boy, just think, one of them drooled, today he was teaching me to water-ski, tonight he's pouring my drink, nudge-nudge.  Others would call for drinks to be delivered to them as they sprawled on the dwindling sands, and can he please take his shirt off before he comes. Splashing about in the sea, drinking too much booze, eating too much food and the ogling of young flesh, far from the prying eyes of others,  that seemed to be the Nekker Experience.  Twenty grand a week, or thereabouts


At the whites only staff barby, the boythings and girlthings prepare Richard's favourite for him -  chickens are broiled, stood vertical over the coals on a beer can which is opened and stuffed into their  aperture; the top removed, the beer is supposed to boil, flavouring the flesh.  It was an oddly obscene sight, a dead chicken, cooking  with a beer can thrust up it, and not just for vegetarians. And one can't help but suspect that, never mind his wet grins,  this ghastly fuck-up of a man would like to see us all with a redhot beercan up our arses.

Despite all the conditions he would have imposed, in this startling show  Branson could not help but expose himself, wanking away at the White Man's Burden.

My old friend Gauguin used to fume:   Life being what it is, one dreams of vengeance. A hurricane would do, sweep all this vermin into the sea,