For those lucky people cushioned by wealth, sequestered by acres, pampered by staff and soothed by circumstance, Covid-19 is merely a summer squall in their long winter of deep content.
The elites, the A-listers, the millionaires, the celebs?
They are never knowingly undersupplied with lockdown loo rolls and bags of flour, nor do they have to choose, in a Welsh supermarket, between new shoes for the kiddies or a litre of vodka.
For someone like Kim Kardashian West, who is all of the above plus a famous bottom to boot, the onset of the current plague is nothing. A blip!
JAN MOIR: For someone like Kim Kardashian West, who is all of the above plus a famous bottom to boot, the onset of the current plague is nothing. A blip!
Recent events suggest that Kimmy thinks a pandemic is something you take when you have a stress headache because Tiffany has run out of diamonds
Not even a dent in her bumper as she glides down the luxury highway from paradise to seven-star opulence and back again.
Girlfriend has got a beauty brand worth a billion dollars and an itch for glitz that simply must be scratched, no matter how many people are fighting for their lives on ventilators.
Does she even know what is going on out there in the real world? Recent events suggest not.
Recent events suggest that Kimmy thinks a pandemic is something you take when you have a stress headache because Tiffany has run out of diamonds.
Oblivious to the suffering and sacrifices being made around the globe, the reality star and businesswoman shared pictures online with her 190 million followers of her 40th birthday celebrations.
‘This is 40!’ she posted, under photographs of herself paddling along a beach in a terrified bikini.
Kim K spent nearly a million dollars on chartering an 88-seat Boeing 777 to fly her dearest friends and family — including sisters Kourtney, Khloe and Kendall, brother Rob, husband Kanye West and mother Kris Jenner — to The Brando, a luxurious private island resort on an atoll in French Polynesia.
Oblivious to the suffering and sacrifices being made around the globe, the reality star and businesswoman shared pictures online with her 190 million followers of her 40th birthday celebrations
There followed the usual dreary round of sushi dinners, spa sessions and parties — it’s the lack of imagination that gets me.
And all the poor masked staff, who had to look on while these Gatsby-esque grotesques partied like all was well with the world.
The birthday girl cavorted in vintage gold designer outfits worth thousands of pounds, while all the She- Kardashians wore the kind of make-up that runs about a fathom deep and could withstand a meteor shower.
Halloween might be on hold this year, but at least we still have the Kardashians to entertain us, the Munsters of the Insta-age.
‘After two weeks of multiple health screens and asking everyone to quarantine, I surprised my closest inner circle with a trip to a private island where we could pretend things were normal just for a brief moment in time,’ Kim posted.
If she expected applause for such generosity and admiration for her extravagance, well, she was wrong
If she expected applause for such generosity and admiration for her extravagance, well, she was wrong.
You could hear the raspberries being blown from here to Hawaii, the revels regarded rather sourly by those whose biggest adventure since lockdown has been a weekly trawl around the exotic fruits section of Marks & Spencer and a new hot water bottle.
Many claimed Ms Kardashian had been tone-deaf and insensitive to the pandemic — but be fair, there is a 15 per cent discount on the resort at the moment. How could she resist?
The holiday was outrageous by any standards but theirs — but I wonder if somewhere in the velvet shallows of Kim Kardashian’s mind, a tiny spark of awareness flared into life following the negative reaction?
‘Feeling so humble and blessed,’ she posted, suggesting she realised something was wrong and that a little bit of belated Mother Teresa-style abnegation wouldn’t go amiss. #soholy #whoopsie #buymylipstick.
You could hear the raspberries being blown from here to Hawaii, the revels regarded rather sourly by those whose biggest adventure since lockdown has been a weekly trawl around the exotic fruits section of Marks & Spencer and a new hot water bottle
One person who saw Kim’s photos wrote: ‘Disgusting. Would have been a more meaningful 40 if you took that money and helped families ruined by COVID. Your families selfishness never ceases to amaze me’
Still, one hopes that this clumsy display of selfish nonsense might clear the rosy fog of awe from the gaze of their fans.
The Kardashians in general, and Kim in particular, have made millions marketing themselves to a young and impressionable audience who buy into their lifestyle and purchase their products.
Now we can see that beneath the glamour, decency and empathy towards their fellow human beings are in very short supply.
Ironically, Covid has a way of unmasking celebrities, revealing those who care and those who care only for themselves.
The crust breaks and you look down into depths of ignorance, selfishness and entitlement that are frankly breathtaking.
From princeling to professional victim
Prince Harry has made another broadcast from his sofa. ‘Ignorance is no longer an excuse,’ he began, though it has served him perfectly well until this point.
Earnestly assessing his own bias on issues of race and class for GQ magazine, Harry said it had taken him many years to recognise his own unconscious prejudices.
‘Having had the upbringing and the education I have, I had no idea what it was, I had no idea it existed.’
This piety is getting really tiresome.
Prince Harry has made another broadcast from his sofa. ‘Ignorance is no longer an excuse,’ he began, though it has served him perfectly well until this point
For one would have thought that wearing a Nazi uniform to a fancy dress party and calling a colleague ‘P*ki’ — as he famously did — would have given the boy-princeling a wee pointer towards the flaws in his character. But no.
He seems keen to be seen to lightly flagellate himself for past ‘unconscious’ sins, while slyly blaming the British Establishment rather than himself.
It seems to have escaped Harry that there are millions of young men, with or without the benefit of his privileged background, who would never dream of doing or saying such awful things.
But he is now a professional victim: a man-child who won’t take responsibility for his dubious choices and blames everyone else instead.
Tupperware is having a lockdown boom. Sales are rocketing as people cook from home and need something for the leftovers.
I think my mother has some original Tupperware boxes from the 1960s. We should call them the Anton Du Bekes — slightly greying, but indestructible.
What on earth did housewives use before Tupperware?
Apparently, many used shower caps popped over bowls to keep food fresh — ugh! Next you’ll be telling me they strained yoghurt and jam through their tights!
Tupperware is having a lockdown boom. Sales are rocketing as people cook from home and need something for the leftovers
Devastating news about Tracey Emin and her ‘bad cancer’.
In a newspaper interview, she makes brave jokes — but admits that at one point thought she wouldn’t make it till Christmas.
The devoted party girl’s remorse about her lifestyle is particularly sad.
‘There are things I regret in my life that I can’t turn back on, I can’t change. I just wish I hadn’t spent so much time drinking and smoking.
And partying — yeah, definitely. Really wish I could turn the clock back on that one,’ she said.
It makes some of her neon artworks even more haunting and piercing.
‘I whisper to my past, do I have another choice’ reads one she made in 2010. Another simply urges: Be Brave.
Devastating news about Tracey Emin and her ‘bad cancer’. In a newspaper interview, she makes brave jokes — but admits that at one point thought she wouldn’t make it till Christmas
I’m not falling for Lay Lady Babs
Excuse me. Where is the actual proof that Bob Dylan wrote Lay Lady Lay about Barbra Streisand? He admired her, yes.
He once sent her flowers, yes. There was even a note to her in his archives, but it hardly bristled with passion.
‘You are my favourite star,’ he wrote. ‘Your self-determination, wit, temperament and sense of justice have always appealed to me.’
Where is the actual proof that Bob Dylan wrote Lay Lady Lay about Barbra Streisand. Pictured: Streisand as Doris in The Owl and the Pussycat
Hmmm. Not exactly throbbing with loins aflame, is it? It sounds more like an homage to Officer Dibble on Top Cat than a declaration of sexual intent.
Nothing in the note comes close to echoing the desire that smokes through Lay Lady Lay’s lyrics: ‘I long to see you in the morning light, I long to reach for you in the night.’
I prefer to believe Dylan was writing about all women, not just Miss Streisand. Although it is all in the ear of the beholder.
My friend, Joyce, thought it was about a charlady folding sheets.
And for years I thought Neil Young’s The Needle And The Damage Done — about injecting heroin — was a lecture on taking care of your LPs. We were so innocent in Dundee!
Terrible modern conundrum for Bond star Naomie Harris, who was brought up by her single mother in a two-bedroom council flat in North London before securing a place at Cambridge.
Good for clever Naomie — who didn’t enjoy her time there — but where does that leave her in the snakes and ladders of contemporary wokeism?
Should she play down her humble roots and talk up her posh education?
Should she claim the usual victimhood of being female, while keeping the spotlight on her mixed Caribbean heritage? What is a girl to do? A mixture of it all, it seems.
Terrible modern conundrum for Bond star Naomie Harris, who was brought up by her single mother in a two-bedroom council flat in North London before securing a place at Cambridge
Be quiet, please. For audio books are not for me. There are too many voices in my head already to add an author crunching through the pages of their latest opus.
I prefer reading books at my own pace, lingering over some passages and speeding lickety-split over others when it gets a bit boring.
However, I’ll make an exception for actor Matthew McConaughey. He has written his autobiography, Green Lights, and an audio version is available.
Be still my beating eardrum. ‘It is about how to be a good man, how to be more me,’ he narrates; the sexy rumble of his Texan accent irresistible.
He has kept a diary for 35 of his 50 years and has ‘no interest in sentimentality or advice’. He just wants to share insights with y’all.
‘I’ve earned a few scars getting through this rodeo of humanity,’ he drawls.
Read on, Matthew. I’m all yours . . . sorry, I mean I’m all ears.