Money does buy you happiness
James Delingpole deals with envy in the mountainous wealth of Chamonix The great consolation for those of us who don't have enough money is the thought that those who do don't really enjoy it. Holidays, for example. Every year we spend a week or two for next to nothing in the Welsh borders and I'm quite sure we have a zillion times more fun than bankers do in the Maldives in those ghastly poncey spa resorts where you have to wander in thick white bathrobes pretending to be chilled, while staff scrape and grovel for tips while chivvying you to down fresh-fruit cocktails at twenty quid a pop.
Just occasionally, though, there are moments when you realise with a depressing lurch that actually this idea that rich people don't have a delightful time being rich is pure wishful thinking. I had one such moment this time last year in Chamonix on a brief skiing holiday in a plutocrats' playzone so perfectly designed that I thought to myself: 'My God. This is so unfair. Money really does buy you happiness!'
The holiday (just 48 hours but we packed so much in it felt like a week) was at a place you might well have heard of if you're young, groovy and connected to the metropolitan party scene. It's called Le Clubhouse — a Twenties stone-built Savoyard mansion converted into a monstrously trendy boutique hotel-cum-cocktail bar by Jonathan Downey, who also owns the Soho private members' club Milk & Honey — and it was the scene of quite possibly the most envy-inducingly JamesBond-like weekend I've ever experienced.
I think the clincher for me — the bit that had all my friends gnashing their teeth and going 'I hate you! I hate you!' whenever I told them about it afterwards — was the optional tour known as The Italian Job. You're picked up in the evening by Le Clubhouse's BMW X5, driven through the Mont Blanc tunnel across the border to Courmayeur in Italy, and then you're rocketed straight up the mountain in the dark on the back of a snowmobile.
Swathed in furs, teeth chattering, clinging desperately to the back of your driver as he flings the snowmobile over moguls and round hairpin bends, you end up in a mountain restaurant, there to stuff your face and get mashed on hot wine in readiness for the even more exciting part: your journey back down the mountain, on skis, by torchlight.
Skiing by night is another experience entirely. Apart from being quite stunningly beautiful — the snow on the dark pines glistening in the moonlight — it feels deliciously naughty: there's no one else around, the pistes are empty, so it's as if you're doing something illicit. It possibly has a good effect on your skiing too. Because you're probably half drunk and you can't see much detail on the piste, you tend to ski in a much more relaxed, fluid manner. Well, until you hit a completely unexpected bump and go flying into the darkness.
With luck, you'll get back from your Courmayeur experience just in time to catch the party in the cocktail bar kicking off. Le Clubhouse attracts some top-notch DJs — when we were there it was the legendary Arthur Baker — which in turn tends to attract all the town's gilded youth, who will inevitably make you feel old, excluded and vile. But then the cocktails will kick in and you'll remember that you're actually staying at this hotel while these Eurotrash scum aren't and that, besides, their beauty and youth will soon be as dust. Then suddenly all will become well and you'll be raving till the small hours, just like you did back in the Summer of Love '88. Or '67 even.
I haven't mentioned the thrilling helicopter ride over the glacier yet; or the unbelievably good massages; or the steak and lobster barbecue and the Sunday lunchtime tartiflette; or the outrageously glam rock-star accommodation with its fur bed-covers, wall-to-wall Ren products, plasma screen TVs, rainforest showers and Myla sex toys.
Le Clubhouse is what happened to the rave generation after it cut down on the pills and found itself ten years older but still wanted occasionally to recapture the glamour, excitement and abandon of its druggy youth, only with all the discomforts and rough edges removed.
Bond traders and hedge fund managers spend their weekends like this all the time. B******s!
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