The world might be in the middle of the biggest credit crisis since Mrs Monty last got hold of my credit card, but it’s still as difficult as ever to look at page after page of expensive, aesthetically pleasing, super expensive ultra modern hardware without thinking, I deserve some of that (or she deserves some of that – depending on one’s choice of reading material). 

The Mont spent this Saturday attempting to justify  the need for a one-off £100,000 sterling Jaguar race bike (Monty doesn’t even have a bike licence), a scale model Hummer that reaches speeds of 80k/h (for use in a 5metre living room) and dinner for two in a Spitfire plane whilst learning how to dogfight (still, enough about Penthouse already). 

The point is, I might recognise that the world will soon face global meltdown, that my degree is worth sod all in a world where plumbers can earn more than doctors and, I might know that for me to buy the latest LCD telly for a month’s wages, some kid will have to work a twenty hour day in some far off country that I will never travel to. But, I still feel poor!

Why have an LCD if you can’t have a Blue Ray player? Why have a Blue Ray if you can’t throw all your DVDs away and buy them all over again in HI-Def? Why have a cupboard full of pictures that, should you die, you hope your mum NEVER has to find should she come to clear out your belongings? Why have any of this crap, if still you pick up a magazine on your day off, look at an advert for a £500,000 Aston Martin and think “A guy like me should have one of those?”

I can’t justify my obsessive greed or my avid worship of consumerist principles. But when the peasant masses are firebombing my apartment, siphoning the petrol from my Nicosia must-have 4wheel drive and generally redistributing the illusion of wealth that I have so lovingly accumulated, I’ll be left with a nagging paranoia that I never quite made it big or had that final accessory to make my life complete.   It will be then and only then that the possessions I have managed to rescue or hide will have any real value.  

I guess I had better get a new lock for that firebomb-proof magazine cupboard.