Michael Rowlands
The awkward lessons of my luxury lockdown in Kensington, an article in the Financial Times by Shruti Advani detailing what most wouldn’t even have the chance to regard as problems. The article was a sickening mix of self pity and blatant gloating. But I’m sure the Financial Times isn’t just interested in giving a platform to the wealthy Londoners during these mad times, they will be just as dedicated in giving their readers an insight into the life of Michael Rowlands under lockdown.
The mad old lessons of my SmartPrice lockdown in Wallsend.
Shruti immediately decided to get her nanny to move into her spare room during the lockdown; even being cursed with children can be minimised through wealth. Being locked in the same house for weeks on end with the chromosomal cocktails of her and her venture capitalist husband’s creation wasn’t going to ruin her plan of withholding love in favour of money. They may start asking questions like ‘who are you?’ and ‘where’s our real mother?’. Best permanently trap their surrogate mother in with them. The eugenics of the elite is handled by those in poverty. I’m sure the nanny has no loved ones she would rather spend these strange days with. But thankfully, poverty blackmail can ensure she is available 24 hours a day to look after someone else’s children.
For myself, plans to go traveling around had been squashed by no country wanting the filthy English in, heightened by the Covid-19 outbreak. Michael Lambert, the poor soundie that I met during my masters who probably thought he would never really see me much when we first met, unfortunately pulled the short straw in the game of ‘who’s letting me live with them now’, without even consenting or wanting to play.
So as Shruti opened her doors to her nanny, Lambert opened up the cat flap, letting in the stray human that I have become. My bedroom, or Lamberts work space as it once was, became my doomsday den. The first 30 or so nights, after sedating myself with a bottle of wine, I would curl up on the floor, in a pile of sheets and pillows, and cat-nap the night away. After this time, with no end in sight to the pandemic, I started constructing a bed each night from raw materials of various settee parts and sheets. Then the morning light would return the bed back into its natural state; like farmers of the past, I’d wake up and get to work with the reconstruction. Around 75 days in, Lambert buys a futon, he’s accept his fate; and with this next evolution, I predict by day 200 I’ll have a queen size bed, climbing the social bed ladder to a mattress high on a pea.
As Ocado’s grocery deliveries were whittled down to one a week and the food halls at Harrods, which had served customers throughout the second world war, shuttered early in the current crisis, we had to find our sustenance elsewhere
Shruti Advani
After ensuring she wouldn’t have to spend any unnecessary time with her children (just spend money instead) Shruti decided that ‘Trebling [her] usual order from Freddie’s Flowers delivery service was the obvious place to start’ in regards to lockdown preparations. I was surprised to see that we followed the same pattern of the ultra rich in this case, as we also trebled our usual weekly flower delivery. We have continued receiving no flower deliveries. Though I did purchase a fresh basil plant, which just like the year 2020 started off well, but then the hands of time squeezed all life and joy out of it. RIP Basil 1.
That weekly non-edible vegetation played a crucial role, as Shruti wanted to ensure that the staff, zoom teachers, and maybe even the children could see lively plants in the background of their calls, or at least show off that they could afford the thrice-weekly delivery. Their garden now just a waste land of dying and deceased flowers, forcing a complex existential crisis to the natural plants. Which makes you think, but what about their wardrobe?
You can’t exclusively rely on flowers to make you look good in virtual meetings. Thankfully, as with any minor issues, a solution can be purchased. And so, a personal shopper was hired to advise a ‘casual but groomed’ style; while the rest of us rock the decadent bum, sloth & slob, or horizontal highness look. Casual but groomed apparently means a hip boiler suit to this personal shopper, but she discarded that advice like one of her children’s finger paintings, and went for some Olivia von Halle silk pyjamas (around £400) which are ‘guaranteed to make the dullest Zoom meeting come alive’. You’ve really got to be participating in the truly dullest Zoom meeting if the highlight is someone pyjamas.
My personal shopper came in the form of a divorce. It seems that once you’ve built a solid reputation of wearing clothes found on the street, ravaging through charity shops and sticking with clothes to the point where they’re nothing more than a shadowy ghost of what they used to be; when some clothes are spare, you’ll get a phone call. And in this case, one man’s depressing divorce and loss of possessions, was this man’s treasure. I was invited round and allowed to explore the mountain of this man’s past life. Finding a load of buried treasures, from formal business to classic european mime; ready to be the highlight of all my business meetings, one being with the Financial Times any day now I’m sure.
Another problem, or the same problem, raises its sticky hands again; a needy child wanting attention from its parent. What happens when the nanny is allowed a break due to these draconian communist laws? I would have thought the maths homework would be an easy transition for Shruti into parenting: calculated, precise, and even more importantly, a perfect pastime for someone with two finance degrees and writes bourgeois articles in the Financial Times. But apparently this relationship wasn’t working. She apparently couldn’t handle the complexities of a seven-year-olds school work. Though I suspect that it wasn’t the numbers in the maths, but rather the number of children involved that was the issue.
After much shouting, we found relief in online tutoring
Shruti Advani
But if there’s one lesson learned, where there’s a problem, there’s a sum of money that it can be buried under. In this case, £65-£95 per hour for chess and maths tutors will do the job. Which apparently ‘costs half as much as the psychiatrist we may have needed otherwise’; although I suspect her children will need it anyway once they grow up between the arms of the ever changing foreign women, rather than their parents. But it just goes to show that getting counselling is expensive, as well as how much this woman really seems to despise her children, to the point of pointing out that spending time with them would cause psychological damage. I hope the nanny is also getting counselling three times a week to deal with it, unless her troubles are simply masked by the perfumes of Freddie’s Flowers.
Shruti immediately decided to get her nanny to move into her spare room during the lockdown; even being cursed with children can be minimised through wealth. Being locked in the same house for weeks on end with the chromosomal cocktails of her and her venture capitalist husband’s creation wasn’t going to ruin her plan of withholding love in favour of money. They may start asking questions like ‘who are you?’ and ‘where’s our real mother?’. Best permanently trap their surrogate mother in with them. The eugenics of the elite is handled by those in poverty. I’m sure the nanny has no loved ones she would rather spend these strange days with. But thankfully, poverty blackmail can ensure she is available 24 hours a day to look after someone else’s children.
I gave up one spare room for our nanny and prepared the other for a friend who needed to be isolated from her husband, a surgeon
Shruti Advani
For myself, plans to go traveling around had been squashed by no country wanting the filthy English in, heightened by the Covid-19 outbreak. Michael Lambert, the poor soundie that I met during my masters who probably thought he would never really see me much when we first met, unfortunately pulled the short straw in the game of ‘who’s letting me live with them now’, without even consenting or wanting to play.
So as Shruti opened her doors to her nanny, Lambert opened up the cat flap, letting in the stray human that I have become. My bedroom, or Lamberts work space as it once was, became my doomsday den. The first 30 or so nights, after sedating myself with a bottle of wine, I would curl up on the floor, in a pile of sheets and pillows, and cat-nap the night away. After this time, with no end in sight to the pandemic, I started constructing a bed each night from raw materials of various settee parts and sheets. Then the morning light would return the bed back into its natural state; like farmers of the past, I’d wake up and get to work with the reconstruction. Around 75 days in, Lambert buys a futon, he’s accept his fate; and with this next evolution, I predict by day 200 I’ll have a queen size bed, climbing the social bed ladder to a mattress high on a pea.
After ensuring she wouldn’t have to spend any unnecessary time with her children (just spend money instead) Shruti decided that ‘Trebling [her] usual order from Freddie’s Flowers delivery service was the obvious place to start’ in regards to lockdown preparations. I was surprised to see that we followed the same pattern of the ultra rich in this case, as we also trebled our usual weekly flower delivery. We have continued receiving no flower deliveries. Though I did purchase a fresh basil plant, which just like the year 2020 started off well, but then the hands of time squeezed all life and joy out of it. RIP Basil 1.
Fortuitously, the Chelsea gym […] was loath to leave its members vulnerable to the dangers of what has since been identified as ”coronacarbs”. we can have little extras such as protein shakes, artisanal coffees and snacks delivered to our doorsteps
Shruti Advani
That weekly non-edible vegetation played a crucial role, as Shruti wanted to ensure that the staff, zoom teachers, and maybe even the children could see lively plants in the background of their calls, or at least show off that they could afford the thrice-weekly delivery. Their garden now just a waste land of dying and deceased flowers, forcing a complex existential crisis to the natural plants. Which makes you think, but what about their wardrobe?
You can’t exclusively rely on flowers to make you look good in virtual meetings. Thankfully, as with any minor issues, a solution can be purchased. And so, a personal shopper was hired to advise a ‘casual but groomed’ style; while the rest of us rock the decadent bum, sloth & slob, or horizontal highness look. Casual but groomed apparently means a hip boiler suit to this personal shopper, but she discarded that advice like one of her children’s finger paintings, and went for some Olivia von Halle silk pyjamas (around £400) which are ‘guaranteed to make the dullest Zoom meeting come alive’. You’ve really got to be participating in the truly dullest Zoom meeting if the highlight is someone pyjamas.
One man’s depressing divorce and loss of possessions,
was this man’s treasure
– Michael Rowlands
My personal shopper came in the form of a divorce. It seems that once you’ve built a solid reputation of wearing clothes found on the street, ravaging through charity shops and sticking with clothes to the point where they’re nothing more than a shadowy ghost of what they used to be; when some clothes are spare, you’ll get a phone call. And in this case, one man’s depressing divorce and loss of possessions, was this man’s treasure. I was invited round and allowed to explore the mountain of this man’s past life. Finding a load of buried treasures, ranging from formal business to classic european mime or elegant bum; ready to be the highlight of all my business meetings, one being with the Financial Times any day now I’m sure.
Another problem, or the same problem, raises its sticky hands again; a needy child wanting attention from its parent. What happens when the nanny is allowed a break due to these draconian communist laws? I would have thought the maths homework would be an easy transition for Shruti into parenting: calculated, precise, and even more importantly, a perfect pastime for someone with two finance degrees and writes bourgeois articles in the Financial Times. But apparently this relationship wasn’t working. She apparently couldn’t handle the complexities of a seven-year-olds school work. Though I suspect that it wasn’t the numbers in the maths, but rather the number of children involved that was the issue.
But if there’s one lesson learned, where there’s a problem, there’s a sum of money that it can be buried under. In this case, £65-£95 per hour for chess and maths tutors will do the job. Which apparently ‘costs half as much as the psychiatrist we may have needed otherwise’; although I suspect her children will need it anyway once they grow up between the arms of the ever changing foreign women, rather than their parents. But it just goes to show that getting counselling is expensive, as well as how much this woman really seems to despise her children, to the point of pointing out that spending time with them would cause psychological damage. I hope the nanny is also getting counselling three times a week to deal with it, unless her troubles are simply masked by the perfumes of Freddie’s Flowers.
Armed thus, with the advantages of wealth, I was insulated from many of the pandemic’s challenges. But the reality of life and death remains a great leveller
Shruti Advani
While Shuri uses bundles of cash to build a barrier from her children, it is the scent of money that guides her to her mother, whom I am presuming lives away in order to not see her child too. As this pandemic has attacked the elderly more than any group, she has understandable worries for her mother, but specifically the will. Most people contact their loved ones to ensure they’re safe, or even just alive; Shuri phones her mother up to debate ‘the need for a revised will’. Proving that the rich really do love money over anything, and will prioritise accordingly. I’m sure her mother loved discussing the reality of her death, but broken down into a pie chart of capital distribution, with Shuri debating/demanding a big old slice of dollar pie.
Many like to say that the virus doesn’t discriminate by class, Shruti believes that ‘the reality of life and death remains a great leveller’, forgetting how being ‘blessed with inheritance’ has made her blind. While all her ‘problems’ have been solved by a simple mouse click, others struggle each day; thankfully I don’t think many of them are reading the Financial Times to keep up to date with the woes and worries of the wealthy. I’ve gone a bit mad under lockdown, seeing the worry and confusion on Lambert’s face as he curses the God or Demon that trapped him in his horror film that is now his life, but I wouldn’t say I have anything to complain about. Thankfully I don’t have kids, and I presume The awkward [lesson] of my luxury lockdown in Kensington was that she wishes the same.