Memories of my White Lotus life
My former job as a pretend multi-millionaire
I finally got around to watching White Lotus the other night and suddenly realised I recognised the hotel. Sure enough, I discovered that it had been filmed at the Four Seasons Samui in Thailand – I’d been there for a long weekend with an old boyfriend when I was living in Hong Kong about a decade ago.
Back then, I did that sort of thing all the time. I was a luxury travel journalist and it was normal for me to go off somewhere every week or two, all expenses paid. There was the elephant sanctuary in Thailand, the hot-air balloon ride over the Serengeti, a trip around Antarctica on a superyacht – the list goes on and is completely absurd. Sometimes I was even allowed to bring friends with me, plural.
The most absurd thing of all is that I got sick of it. My dream job. Granted, it took ten years, but yup, in the end, I got pretend multi-millionaire’s fatigue. Another ski trip? Yawn. A private jet to Monaco? Already done it, thought the mile-high food was a bit average, actually. In short, I had become insufferably spoilt. Jaded by too much of a good thing. What a fool!
I would kill to be that five-star freebie brat today. I’m now the solo parent to two children under five and that means a holiday – even a luxurious one – is not really a holiday anymore. I’ve tried to make it happen. I even flew to the Cayman Islands in January.