The lap of luxury

How would you define luxury? Is it something only available to a few people, or something that costs a fortune, or just something you want rather than something you need?

My personal definition of luxury is none of those. It's something that lifts me out of my everyday existence and makes me feel on top of the world.

Some of my personal luxuries are:

• Eating out. Hugely extravagant but a lovely occasional treat.
• Extra-delicious food. In particular bread, cake, desserts, chocolate.
• A trip to the theatre. Only rarely given such crazy prices!
• My weekly chat with Jenny in the local coffee shop.
• Books. I love being totally engrossed in a really good book.
• A beautiful piece of furniture that cost a lot but I can enjoy it for years.
• Ditto a beautiful painting.
• Lazing in the garden on a hot, sunny day. Not that frequent in Belfast!
• Holidays, especially in places I've never been to before.
• A long hot shower. Or a long hot bath.

I suppose these could all be summed up under the heading of pampering. It's all very relative though. To someone really hard up, getting a taxi, having a hairdo or buying a new duvet might be the height of luxury, while to someone hugely rich, to get any sense of luxury they'd have to buy a new yacht or a £10,000 watch.

Coffee blunder

I love stories about officialdom gone mad, and this is a splendid example.

Ms Burcu Yesilyurt was fined £150 by Richmond Council, London, for pouring coffee down a drain before getting on a bus. She was told she had broken the Environmental Protection Act 1990, which makes it an offence to dispose of waste in a way likely to pollute land or water.

Apart from the fact that she was totally unaware of this obscure law, probably like the vast majority of us, she couldn't see any obvious harm in pouring a small amount of undrunk coffee down a drain.

We don't get fined if we pour coffee (or any other polluted liquid) down our kitchen sink. So why is it an offence to pour it down an outside drain?

In any case there must be many people, and companies, causing serious large-scale pollution that really does merit a fine - a huge fine. Is Richmond Council pursuing them with the same diligence? I doubt it.

The council quickly responded to the ensuing uproar and rescinded the fine. But why was she fined in the first place? Couldn't the council officials simply have pointed out the law she was breaking and warned her not to do the same thing again?

Pic: Burcu Yesilyurt

Under pressure

School sports days used to be very innocent affairs, known for such harmless activities as egg and spoon races and three-legged races.

But that's all changing now, it seems. Parents are shouting abuse at sports teachers and putting pressure on children to excel. It's got so bad that parents have been banned from attending sports events at a number of South London primary schools due to "concerning behaviours".

Sports days are meant to be fun, not competitive occasions on which children have to be pushed harder and harder.

The sports days I attended at school were the innocent events you would expect. Yes, the egg and spoon race and the three-legged race and the sack race. There was a friendly and good-natured atmosphere and no hint of competitive striving.

I wouldn't have liked being pressured to outdo the other boys. I was never a competitive person so I would have hated it. I would have invented some clever excuse to opt out.

Exceedingly odd

Like most people I've had plenty of odd experiences in my life. To list a few:

Being on a tube train going through Kings Cross station, London, in 1987 minutes before the station was engulfed in a massive fire.

My first day at work. In 1965 smoking in offices was normal and I virtually suffocated from the thick fug of tobacco smoke. Alarmingly, I soon got used to it.

A very informal interview for the Guardian in 1970. It took place in the local greasy spoon over bacon sandwiches*. I didn't get the job.

Having food poisoning on a flight to Australia and finding the woman beside me also had food poisoning. So we were able to pinpoint the source - we had both had an egg sandwich at Costa, Heathrow.

Losing my sense of smell. No idea when that first happened, but it was well before covid so that wasn't the cause.

Being with a rather drunk girl friend (not Jenny) when she lost control of the car and drove into a field. Luckily neither of us was injured.

I could go on but I won't.

* I didn't become a vegetarian until 1975

Hung up on celebs

I'm always intrigued by those people who get totally hung up on celebrities - following their every move, absorbing every little detail about their lives, copying their tastes and preferences, lavishing them with constant praise and adulation.

Personally I might have a high opinion of a singer or novelist or artist, but I don't worship the ground they tread on. I see them as another human being, talented in some ways but probably deeply flawed in other ways.

There's a general tendency to idealise celebrities and put them on a pedestal as if they're somehow far superior to the rest of us.

Even when the celebrity is dead, the worship goes on. There are hundreds of people who dress like Elvis and perform like Elvis. Why oh why?

As for those people deluded enough to think they have a romantic relationship with the celebrity and badger them non-stop with love letters, I feel for the person who's on the receiving end of it all.

Meanwhile Taylor Swift mania has passed me by. What's all the fuss about?

Looking forward

One of the things that makes life worth living is having something to look forward to.

In my case:

• My monthly book group
• My weekly class on Early Victorian Britain
• Waking up next to Jenny
• The leaves changing colour as they fall
• Art exhibitions
• Well-written and captivating novels
• Playing CDs
• Chocolate
• The garden coming alive in the spring
• Scrabble

And plenty of other things I can't recall off the top of my head.

I can't imagine how miserable you must be if you have little to look forward to and you're just aimlessly dragging out the days.

My days go so fast I'm astonished to find that another month or another year have somehow sped by.

All those things I'm looking forward to are really eating up the calendar.

Early waking

I gave up on the idea of regular sleeping patterns long ago. They might be regular if you're a child but once you're an adult it's a different story.

The reality is that my body wakes me up any time it feels like it between 4 am and 7 am. I used to fuss and fret about this physical anarchy and wonder why I couldn't control my own body.

Now I've given up trying to fix my sleeping patterns and I just go with the flow. If I wake at 4 am, no problem, I simply make a cup of tea and read for a while.

I never take sleeping pills. They don't work and just make me feel weird.

Believe it or not, I can have a completely coherent conversation with Jenny while I'm asleep, and not remember a word of it the next day.

Going to sleep on the other hand couldn't be easier. I nod off in about ten minutes and that's that - unless I'm away from home somewhere, in which case falling asleep will probably take longer.

Once I'm asleep I sleep pretty soundly. There are no children to wake me, no pets to wake me, little background noise of any sort.

But I never sleep on planes. There's too much going on around me for me to settle down sufficiently.

I used to find it easy to get out of bed in the morning, but that's not so any more. Quite often I don't want to get up at all, I just want to stay in my warm, cosy bed for as long as possible.

Or better still, hibernate until the spring.