What Does Rich Mean To You Exactly? The Story Of Two Knights and One Day.
Beckham, Blair, The Sunday Times Rich List, And, The Homeless Who Connect The Dots.
[The Sunday Times has its Rich List. We have our questions]
What Does Rich Mean To You Exactly? The Story Of Two Knights and One Day.
Beckham, Blair, The Sunday Times Rich List, And The Homeless Who Connect The Dots.
I was thinking, the other night. Now there’s a thought in itself. Dangerous for me — paracetamol alert time.
Anyway. Potential headache aside, here we go. Sir David Beckham. Sir Tony Blair — and a man in Bristol city centre getting through the day. What connects them is the one question nobody asks. No. Not even me, till now.
And somewhere in that stillness — with the Sunday Times Rich List fresh off the press and the wealth gap wider than ever, the cost of living grinding people down, and the politics of envy running at full volume across every social media platform going — a thought arrived that hadn’t really occurred to me before.
I am rich. Not quite meeting the contraindication standard of an over-the-counter pharmaceutical, one would expect. However.
Now stay with me on that.
Rich Is Subjective — And That’s The Problem
When I say rich I don’t mean the Sunday Times Rich List. I don’t mean a private jet idling at Farnborough while someone decides which yacht to board from, well, say, somewhere exotic. Like.
Brighton Marina. For example.
You know.
I mean I have a roof over my head. I can put food on the table. I can pay my bills. The years of having a toy yacht in the bath with me. Long since passed. Mind you. I used to play with military toy tanks as well. Not amphibious. Surprisingly. At that time.
And when you hold that against the reality of billions of people struggling for shelter, for food, for survival, then yes. By any honest measure. I am rich.
It just took me until two thirty on a Thursday morning, in late May. To notice.
The Sunday Times Rich List — Two Knights And The Name As Machine.
So. Let’s take a little moment to consider the Sunday Times Rich List. Sir David Beckham. Sir Tony Blair. Among many others of, perhaps, more relevance right now.
And I’m not dismissing the graft — for any of them. The hours on the pitch, the years in Downing Street. The hours sweating over the next financial forecast, waiting in the wings. Somewhere between pain and pleasure.
However, at some point something shifts, doesn’t it. The wealth stops being proportional to the work and starts being proportional to the name. And the name becomes a separate machine entirely.
And Sir Tony Blair is cited here as one illustration among many — any household name from any side of any argument would serve the point equally well.
You see, if Sir David Beckham opens a chain of boutique shops tomorrow, or Sir Tony Blair walks into a room to give a speech, that name does what no amount of effort from you or me can do.
The barrier at that level isn’t hard work. It is fame.
And fame is partly talent, partly timing, and partly the culture simply deciding that this is the person it’s going to elevate. Nobody votes themselves into that category by grafting harder.
The fact that someone can become a multi-millionaire sports person without ever sitting in an exam hall, bears testimony to this. Being modestly unspecific about it.
The I Want Engine — And The Moment Want Becomes Deserve.
And you know, we all grow up wanting something better, don’t we.
You buy a house, you want a better house. You get a lawnmower and suddenly you want one you can ride around the bigger garden you have somehow acquired. Albeit remotely inaccessible.
The I want engine never quite switches off, in us all. Does it?
And at some point, almost without noticing, I want quietly becomes I deserve.
You see, want is at least honest. Deserve is want with a moral claim bolted onto it.
And that shift — that small, quiet shift — is where an awful lot of our modern discontent lives.
We are never content with what we have. Are we.
A Bentley In Bristol — And A Tax Strategy Wearing Coachwork.
I was sitting outside one of the cafes I frequent last week when a Bentley convertible pulled up. Horrendously expensive.
The driver got out, late thirties to mid-forties. And you could feel the shift in the air around me. People turning, staring.
Particularly the younger lads, early teens, faces open with something close to awe. Their wow moment of the day. The aspiration already being installed on a Bristol pavement.
For me it was just an expensive set of wheels.
The conversations around me were mixed. Some begrudging. Some wistful.
However, what struck me was that a car like that almost certainly sits against a business expense somewhere. A write-off. A structure.
The conspicuous consumption we look up at and feel the pull of is sometimes just a tax strategy wearing coachwork.
Baggy Khan, A Lamborghini, And The Gap Between What Politics Says And What It Does.
Which brings me to something that tells us rather a lot about the gap between what politics says and what it sometimes does.
In May 2026, Baggy Khan — no relation to a similarly named Jungle Book character whatsoever — a newly elected Green Party councillor for Halliwell ward in Bolton, was posting on Instagram alongside a bright orange Lamborghini Huracán Spyder within days of winning his seat.
A car worth upwards of two hundred thousand pounds when new. A 5.2 litre V10 engine returning around fifteen miles to the gallon. Couldn’t be any more suited to an increasing number of 20mph speed limits, wouldn’t you say.
Anyway. His party’s defence was that it was a hired car at a family wedding, not his vehicle. Fair enough.
However, the Green Party of England and Wales, led by Zack Polanski, holds as a core policy position the removal of petrol and diesel cars from roads entirely, and had recently proposed cutting motorway speed limits to 55mph specifically for fuel efficiency. So. I think it’s fair to assume Lamborghini will likely not become a party donor. Then.
When challenged on social media, Khan’s reported response was: who said councillors cannot drive cars like this.
Indeed. Who said they cannot. You can see why people asked, though.
Wealth As Performance — And The Industrial Effort Behind Apparent Ease.
As unremarkable as this may be, to some. There comes a certain point where wealth stops being something we have and starts being something we perform. Admittedly, this can take a while.
We see it in the movies often enough. The entourage. The motorcade. The table at the restaurant that nobody else can get. Props on a stage.
And like any performance it needs a cast to support it. The personal assistants, the security detail, the people whose entire job is to make the whole thing look effortless.
The performance of apparent ease requires an industrial level of effort to sustain.
And it needs an audience. Without one the performance collapses.
It is the teenagers on the pavement, faces open with awe, that complete the scene. They aren’t bystanders. They are cast members. Their wonder is part of the production. The great pantomime of life. In which the prince’s coach arrives. Centre stage.
The Swiss Know Something We Don’t.
Which is why the Swiss observation has always stayed with me.
A number of years ago I got into a conversation with someone who lived in Switzerland. And he told me that the Swiss look down on any display of ostentation.
Wealth there signals through absence, not display.
Because what a Lamborghini outside a wedding, or a Bentley outside a Bristol cafe, is really broadcasting isn’t success. It is a need to be seen to have succeeded.
The Swiss simply refuse to be the audience. And without an audience, the performance is nothing.
The Four Pillars — Everything Else Is A Construct.
So strip it all back. What do we need?
Four things. Shelter. Heat. Light. Food.
That’s it. Everything beyond those four pillars is a construct. Something we’ve agreed to assign value to.
Status. Aspiration. The lifestyle that exists just above wherever we currently are, always receding as we move toward it.
And yet richness means something different to everyone.
To someone else it could be as simple as having their own garden. Or a window box where things grow that give them pleasure, help to sustain them, or both. Small. Particular. Entirely theirs.
Ikebana, Bonsai, And The Wealth Nobody Can See.
Or consider someone on the other side of the world finding their richness in Ikebana — the Japanese art of flower arrangement practised for six centuries, also known as Kadō, the Way of Flowers.
An arrangement made with care and intention, and gone within days. The impermanence isn’t the limitation. It is the teaching.
Or in Bonsai. A living tree cultivated with patience, pruned and tended over years, decades, lifetimes.
Some Bonsai alive today predate entire generations. The practitioner knows the tree will outlive them.
That isn’t a sadness. That is a form of richness most of us standing outside a showroom never even glimpse.
Not acquiring. Not displaying. Just tending something living. And finding, in that, the wealth we carry inside.
The First Aspiration — Just Having A Job.
And yet for a growing number of people in this country, the first aspiration on that ladder is simply having a job.
A real one. Stable. Something to build a life from. Because without that the ladder doesn’t begin. The construct never gets started.
And we spend our lives looking at other people’s constructs and feeling the absence of them. That is the politics of envy.
And it’s a remarkably efficient system. Keep us looking upward at what we don’t have.
Because dissatisfaction, as it happens, is very good for consumption. The system has no use for any of us deciding we already have enough.
How Many Cars Can We Drive At Once?
How much does any one of us need?
How many cars can we drive at once? How many properties can we live in simultaneously? How many planes can we fly at the same time?
At some point we are buying things for the sake of buying things. Or because the taxman will take it otherwise. Not because it brings any proportional increase in happiness, freedom, or peace of mind.
The Man In Bristol — Wealth Isn’t Always On Display.
Now, there’s a man I see regularly around Bristol city centre. Unkempt.
Walks around asking if anyone has any change, picking up half-finished drinks from cafe tables, asking for cigarettes.
And I say this without judgment. He is someone the world hasn’t been especially kind to.
However. I got this from someone who used to manage a betting office.
That same man would walk in with two thousand pounds and lay it on the horses. Just like that.
You see, wealth isn’t always something that’s on display.
The man we looked at with pity was probably carrying more money than most people around him. We would never have known.
And that raises an uncomfortable question about the politics of envy, doesn’t it.
Who exactly are we envying. We don’t identify it accurately, let alone see it.
How Much Is Enough — The Question Nobody Asks
And yet the one question none of us ever asks is the most obvious one of all.
How much is enough.
Not as a political question. Not as an economic one. Just as a human question.
How much does any one of us need before we can look around and say — yes. This is enough. I am good. I have what I need.
The silence where the answer should be is telling.
Money, Happiness, And The Most Expensive Mistake Any Of Us Ever Make.
You hear it said that money doesn’t make us happy. And there’s something in that.
However money doesn’t deliver happiness — what it delivers is the conditions in which contentment becomes possible.
We confuse the two. And that confusion — and I include my former self in this — is probably the most expensive mistake any of us ever make.
Because happiness and contentment aren’t the same thing.
Happiness depends on what’s happening around us. Contentment comes from within.
I have clothes to wear. Food to eat. The bills paid. The basics.
And within that I am content. Spiritually. Psychologically. Settled.
Would I say I am happy? When I look at what’s going on in the world around us, probably not.
However content? Yes. Without question.
I Walked Away From It — And Then I Was Homeless.
Now I should tell you that I’m not watching all of this from a comfortable distance.
There was a time, not that long ago, when I had serious money. The kind of excess that would make most people’s eyes water.
It’s in my book if you want the details. We are talking a serious number of noughts after the figure.
I walked away from it.
And then I was homeless. Living on the streets. Nothing.
You see. When you are homeless you have no bills. No overheads. No outgoing expenses beyond sustaining yourself.
I had less money than ever and yet more than I needed, because need had been stripped back to its bare minimum.
And you know what. It was wonderful.
Not surviving. Not enduring. Wonderful. Because the weight of it was simply gone.
The Richness That Nobody Can Take.
Now, some years later, I have the bills and the overheads again. I live just above hand to mouth.
I can pay the bills, put food on the table, move through the world on my own terms.
I buy scratch cards, just for a bit of fun. It is like life — some days you win, some days you lose. I have no great expectations.
And I am fairly confident the only time I will ever win the jackpot is on my deathbed, at which point, you will appreciate, it will be somewhat academic.
However. What I have carried out of all of it is this.
The richness of wisdom. The richness of intellect. A richness within myself as a human being.
And if I’m being honest with you at two thirty on a Thursday morning in late May, it’s the only kind that was ever worth having.
Left Luggage — To Be Collected By Someone Else.
Because when the time comes, wealth isn’t luggage you can take with you. It is left behind. In the left luggage area. To be collected by someone else. At a later date.
The main beneficiary, usually being the taxman.
The Almighty Gob is a Bristol-based publication founded by John Langley — independent Bristol mayoral candidate 2016 and 2021, and one of the city’s most forensic observers of institutional power. Publishing since 2020, with around 700 pieces across seven platforms and Substack at thealmightygob.com — no party allegiance, no press accreditation, no interest in acquiring either.
© 2026 John Langley / The Almighty Gob. All rights reserved.