My brief time hanging out with the super-rich

Your brain likes to be busy. You know the devil finds work for idle hands. But busy doesn’t always mean productive. Sometimes my brain doesn’t want to do any meaningful work, it simply wants to block out negative thoughts with the siren call of social media. I deleted TikTok last year once I realised how seductive the endless scroll could be and I've been feeling pretty smug about it. But then Instagram started pushing Reels onto everyone in a cynical bid to make the platform even more addictive and moved the widgets around so that even if you try to avoid them, your finger will slip and you’ll be confronted by a stranger with no formal qualifications in nutrition telling you to comment “SHITMYSELF” for advice on how to lose belly fat in five days. 

The way out of this death spiral of stupidity is to read books. It’s embarrassing how hard it is to pick up a book and read more than 10 pages when you’re in a particularly high period of phone usage. The constant fake rewards your brain is used to receiving when scrolling aren’t there with books (although I cannot be the only one to notice how much shorter chapters are these days, often all ending on a cliffhanger). You have to pay proper attention to a book and it takes a while to concentrate in that way, something that had been natural for centuries but is now strange and uncomfortable because of smartphones. I just finished reading Patrick Radden Keefe’s latest - London Falling - which expands on his 2024 New Yorker piece about a teenager called Zac Brettler who fell from a luxury flat into the river Thames in 2019. Like everything Radden Keefe writes, this book is deeply researched, beautifully written and reads like a novel. Ostensibly about Brettler’s mysterious death, the book takes a really deep dive into London’s vast and murky wealth and the people who control it. If you live in London, you know about the dirty money which swills around this place but seeing it set out on the page like this is still shocking. 

Zac was from a successful upper middle class family in a leafy part of north London. When he went to private secondary school, he was newly surrounded by the children of the uber wealthy - those with chauffeurs and housekeepers and monthly allowances of more than some adult salaries. Suddenly his family circumstances seemed modest by comparison. He started to lie. He was the son of an oligarch, he told people. He had an inheritance of millions coming to him. A chauffeured car would occasionally take him and a friend out, he pretended he lived in one of the most expensive apartment complexes in Kensington. As he got older, he began to hang out with increasingly unsavoury people (to put it mildly), a group where everyone was lying about who they were in order to get rich. To expose someone else as a fraud was dangerous. To be exposed yourself, deadly. 

I am also the child of a successful upper middle class family who went to secondary school in a leafy part of north London where I was suddenly surrounded by unimaginable wealth. I too began to see my own family as not enough as a result. It’s absurd isn’t it, to see my own circumstances as anything other than privileged beyond belief? But that’s what next level wealth does, it warps your perception. When you’ve made friends with a girl who is dropped off to school in a Rolls Royce driven by a chauffeur, you start to feel inadequate. I’m not saying this hoping for solidarity, I’m aware it’s a mad and rarified problem to have. But after reading London Falling, I understood Zac Brettler better than I’d like to admit. As a teenager, I began to go clubbing in central London. The kind of establishments where you pay hundreds of pounds to sit at a table and champagne is served with sparklers in lieu of a cork. Nightclubs which hosted Prince Andrew when he wasn’t sweating, places where you’d see Saudi princes mixing with British socialites and the party atmosphere only just about managed to conceal a real darkness. I was completely enamoured, to the point where I started working as a clipboard girl on the door of one such establishment aged just 16. My parents were baffled by the life I was drawn towards, one of showy materialism and vaguely dodgy men talking about unlikely business deals. My allowance didn’t stretch to being able to pay for anything but taxis to take me into this new world. Luckily (‘luckily’) in this world, feminism didn’t exist. Men paid, women were objectified, you tried to go home unscathed.