How The Other Half Live

I bought a new mixing desk for my recording studio this weekend. Well it's new to my studio but is actually about 14 years old. I found it on eBay - it's the same make as the one I have (the one which is sick and dying a slow and painful death) but several years newer and the next model up the range. These vintage desks are very heavy, so buying a mixing desk on eBay is only any good if the seller lives near enough to make collecting it feasible. Fortunately this seller lives less than 30 miles away, so off I toddled. The route planner got me to his house without any problems. Now let me just pause there a second. When I say house I really mean "HOUSE", or to be more accurate "MANSION"!! I have never in all my life been in such a house. It doesn't look all that impressive from the outside - nothing Beckham-like in the way of ostentation etc., but inside it was like a Tardis. As we wended our way through the massive hallway, past the enormous kitchen, the piano room, the room with a snooker table and a bar, the several other rooms adjoining that I never got chance to explore further, then past the swimming pool that must have been 20 metres long, into the recording studio that apparently used to be the sauna but they never used it so they converted it etc. etc. my jaw just kept dropping lower and lower. I really could not take it in all in one go - I mean, I know that houses like that exist, but you don't expect to find yourself in one whilst picking up an eBay purchase, especially oop North where we are not as affluent.

I have to say, though, that the guy and his family could not have been any less snobbish. He is a car dealer and has made his money through hard graft, he still drinks in the working mens club etc. and he and his family made me and my kids feel really welcome and at ease. I don't begrudge them any of their material possessions. I have to confess to a tinge of envy, especially when I realised that my kids couldn't even dream of having a house with a pool etc. However, though I may not be wealthy in a material sense, and though we have to watch every penny, we do not want for anything that matters, and we have a lot of love within our family along with many other good things that money cannot buy. Don't get me wrong, I would dearly love to have more money, and I dread to even think about how we will live when I retire, but I have learned that it is not the be-all and end-all of our existence. It was nice to get a glimpse of how the other half lives, though, even if it is way beyond my wildest dreams. Ah well!