We have our problems, Kim Kardashian and me…

KIM Kardashian West and me both have our problems. Kim has had jewellery worth millions stolen during a hold-up in Paris and tomorrow I will be 60. My misfortune is of a different nature, it is true, but does come with the benefit of giving me an excuse for knowing hardly anything at all about Kim Kardashian West.

I understand, in so far as I can be bothered, that Kim is a reality TV star who is married to the rapper Kanye West, with whom she has two children.

A quick picture search on Google suggests that she doesn’t worry unduly about catching a chill when she goes out, as she has a loose understanding of what most women call getting dressed. She also lacks any noticeable shyness about her breasts. Men of nearly 60 shouldn’t notice these things, although men of nearly 60 are still men, and men do notice these things even when they shouldn’t.

Perhaps Kim favours jewellery instead of clothes and maybe that is why masked robbers were able to steal jewels worth an estimated £8.7 million pounds from her luxury apartment in Paris’s upmarket 8th arrondissement.

Here are a few thoughts on this person about whom I know so little. This was a serious crime and the robbers, who are reported to have dressed as police officers, put a gun to Kardashian’s head. Genuinely scary and no one deserves that – not even a fabulously wealthy woman who found fame in a manner I don’t really understand, and don’t wish to understand.

There is something else I don’t grasp; there are many things I don’t grasp, but here is this thing beyond my comprehension: why does one woman need so much jewellery; and is Kim Kardashian West actually being employed as a catwalk parable to illustrate the stupidity of extreme wealth?

A nice ring that costs a grand or two; a sparkly necklace that might run to three grand; perhaps. But £8.7 million on jewellery? Such wealth must bring with it an impoverishment of good sense. Most people when on holiday worry about their passport or their travellers’ cheques – do those still exist? – or perhaps their camera. Having jewellery worth millions in your holiday apartment seems wilfully negligent.

I don’t understand why anyone needs so much jewellery or so much money. Maybe such vast wealth is a sort of competition, a dog-eat-dog-and-spits-up-a-diamond game. Whatever the case, it brought to mind the title of an F. Scott Fitzgerald short story, The Diamond As Big As The Ritz, which opens with young Percy Washington playing one-upmanship over wealth – “That’s nothing… That’s nothing at all. My father has a diamond as big as the Ritz-Carlton Hotel.”

I guess something in favour of such a diamond is that it would be impossible to steal, unlike those which Kim Kardashian West likes to drape about her much-photographed person.

The ordeal is said to have left her “badly shaken but physically unharmed”. And should you feel an any harsh thoughts coming on about her extravagant misfortune, you will have to answer to the TV personality James Corden, who took to Twitter to say that people being unkind about Kardashian should: “Be nice or shut up.”

Okay, James – that is just what I shall do.

One comment

  1. Happy birthday for yesterday, Julian. It’s not so bad, hitting the 60s. Except yesterday this chap giving out letters about lunches for the old and lonely, stopped me, handed me one, and asked if I knew of “any other old people living round here”. That “other” really hurt, and clashed with my (eternally youthful) self-image . Anyway, keep on truckin’ !

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