What’s important in life?

Several things today made me think about priorities. It started with an e-mail from friend Ian who had read my blog and commented

Something I do which adds to my happiness and hence to the total happiness of the race is to remind myself how lucky I am. The list of my good fortune is extensive, and I suspect I am normal in this. I hope that the contentment I feel makes me behave better to everyone else. Imagine how grim I would be if I didn't count my blessings!!! Thanks for reminding me that there the nonmaterial things are so very important!

I’ve sent Ian instructions so he can comment on the blog.

Then Clive James’ A Point of View this morning. His point today is ‘Getting rich quick - and having much more money than you ever need - will look as pointless as taking bodybuilding too seriously.’ He goes on to say that getting rich quick will soon look very silly - in fact it does already. He rails against the superyacht owners: we’ve seen some of these boats in the UK and the Med. We have a term for them: FGP - Floating Gin Palaces. Clive asks what the

multibillionaires who owned yachts were hoping to achieve. At best, their ridiculous unarmed battleships, permanently parked in the teeming marina of the sort of city where the world's well-dressed dimwits gather to gamble at the casino, were described as floating palaces. What kind of numbskull wants a palace that floats, when he could just have a palace, out of whose front door he could stride with some confidence that he would not plunge face-first into the harbour? I was really asking a question about what you can do with too much money, and the answer was obvious: never enough.

I think Clive is a little dismissive about boating - but that’s for another day.

We’ve seen these excesses: I remember one superyacht in Turkey: there was a hire car on the quay in case they needed it, the crew went ashore to inspect the restaurants, and when some of the owners or charterers came ashore, another dinghy had gone ahead to help them ashore.

Clive ends with

From now on a man will have to be as dumb as an petrodollar potentate to think that anyone will respect him for sitting on a gold toilet in a private jumbo jet. Excess wealth is gone like the codpiece. The free market will continue but any respect for the idea of free money is all over. If you've got it, flaunt it by all means, but if you haven't earned it, forget about it. There isn't going to be a change of consciousness, there's already been one, which is why I can be so confident when I predict it.

If you hurry, you can read the full text of the programme and download a podcast at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/views/a_point_of_view/

There was more later. At lunchtime in ‘Ali Abbas in his own words’ Hugh Sykes talked to the boy who hit the headlines when he was badly burned in a US attack in Iraq - he lost his arms, and all his close family were killed. If you search for Ali Abbas on google images you’ll get some horrific pictures - I didn’t feel it right to copy them here. The whole programme was inspirational (if you’re very quick you can catch it on the BBC IPlayer) but the most moving part was the way he cheerfully described a visit by American servicemen when he returned to Iraq:

He asked me "what happened to you?" I said "The American bomb" "So sorry" I said "Good enough"

How’s that for forgiveness?