The strange antics of the very rich

Moved by a piece in yesterday's 'Evening Standard' on the fate of the late Baroness Thatcher's house in Belgravia to put the new Pentel ink brush to work (see 7th April) to produce this sketch of a very rich person's town house in a street of same somewhere near Sloane Square. Only one house shown for clarity.

So we have the original house upper left and the original shed for the outdoor servants upper right, with a garden in between. Mews access road behind the shed not shown.

Then, with scene so set, the must-do scheme is to burrow down from both original buildings to create a large underground bunker, a smaller version of the much larger bunker built under MoD Main Building in Whitehall. The two shafts will mainly contain things like security doors, services, lifts and stairs, while the bunker proper, over several floors, contains things like library, smoking room, gym, games room, bar and discothèque. One only hopes that the rich person concerned has enough friends, flunkies and other hangers-on to populate all these wonderful facilities.

And then at the very bottom there is what purports to be a swimming pool but is actually a warm boson detector built to the specifications of said MoD. Apparently they are very concerned about what might happen to the warm boson population should it come to pass that we invite the Chinese to build our nuclear power stations for us as we are too disorganised to build our own. The prongs at the bottom are the piles needed to stop the whole edifice moving about and perhaps collapsing, but I am not sure how you get the pile driver down there without making a huge hole in the street, which even a Tory council might get upset about. Left to the reader as an exercise.

Be that as it may, given that most of the neighbours are at much the same thing, one does not need to feel too sorry for them on account of all the disruption, noise and dust. I just wonder why such people, if they want such a big house with all the trimmings, don't just move out to, for example, leafy Surrey. They could come to Epsom, not bother with an underground bar and slum it with the rest of us in the Assembly Rooms, a sound historic operation now run under the benign management of J. D. Wetherspoon.

The bottom line is that the Pentel is coming on. Not much cop yet but I think there are signs of life there; it might even end up better for a quick sketch than a biro.