Relative Values

Conventional wisdom has it that money can't buy you happiness (nor indeed love, for that matter) but scientists have now proven that it's more complicated than that.

We knew this already of course (although this knowledge was in fact supposition until the eggspurts got onto it). I always reckoned, in my hard-up living-alone-in-London days, that being able to afford a washing machine and a car would make a really massive, transformational improvement to my quality of life. Beyond that - owning your own home, affording ready meals, expensive clothes, holidays abroad - everything counted as nice to have, as opposed to necessity. I still think that now.

So I am endlessly appreciative of the nice-to-haves that I enjoy having in my life now. I was chatting on the phone to my sister a while ago, as I was getting ready to go to a dinner at the Dorchester. I laughed and said I was looking forward to seeing how the other half lived.

"You are the other half!" she said.

I cetainly never expected to live in such a nice house, (detached and no lodgers!), mortgage paid off, drive lovely cars, go abroad on holiday several times a year. For a girl who started life in a council house in Margate and going on holiday to Pontins at Camber Sands (all of about 40 miles from home) it's really quite something. And since plenty of branches of the family are still struggling to make ends meet on the big estates of south-east London, I appreciate what I have.

The study into money and happiness found that getting richer only makes you happy if you outstrip the people around you. I'd better confess upfront that I only skim-read this study, based on a snippet I read in the Metro, but there's more information here. I was irritated by the research at first - I thought it was talking about schadenfreude, keeping up with the Jones's. But then I thought ,no, perhaps it means people like me. Knowing how fortunate we are and really understanding, appreciating, the difference that the extra money can make. I love opening the front gate, peeping around it through the shrubs up the path, leading up to the front door, and thinking "Wow, I actually live here!" It never ceases to surprise me.

It works the other way too. We buy an Aston Martin, and that gets us on a mailing list to be invited to the Boat Show as guests of Sunseeker. At the end of that day, one of was grinning from ear to ear, having spent hours fraudulently pretending to assess the merits of various luxury features from on-deck hot-tubs to walk-in humidors. One of us was feeling like a poor country churchmouse because we don't have a yacht.

Sometimes this makes me very angry.

However the study says this is the experience for many people. What happens, I can see, is that often a change in your lifestyle means you make new friends. It doesn't mean you've lost the old ones, but it does mean that your life then feels ordinary. If I drove around my teenage stamping grounds Oop North in my immaculately-restored classic Ferrari, I wouldn't feel that I'd made it. Actually I'd feel like a ridiculous showing-off twat and I simply wouldn't do it. When I drive it through the Cotswolds in the summer, I do feel quite cool and smart. But mostly I drive that car to Ferrari Owners Club events, and it feels pretty run of the mill all of a sudden.

Maybe he's less happy than I am because he's cursed by having grown up in a wealthy, colonial environment with houseboys and swimming pools and country clubs, and always expected a life at least as good as this, if not considerably better, and with sunshine thrown in too.

We've got various friends now who have serious, serious money - and they don't seem to be any happier than the rest of the people we know. One of my pals spent years slogging away in the family engineering business founded by his grandfather. He really hated it. He received a surprise offer and after much soul-searching he sold the company and personally received nearly £30 millon, all cash. Lovely, lovely man, couldn't happen to anyone nicer.

"The great thing about it, " we told him, "is with a sum of money like that, you can afford to anything you want to".

The first item of post he received, the first day the money hit his bank, was a prospectus for a yacht. Price tag: £31 million.