Lindsay Slogrove
Durban - Here’s a wee question for the seriously rich.
Why on Earth would a three-person family, one a 15-month-old toddler, need 16 bathrooms?
S.I.X.T.E.E.N.
Our work emails are flooded with some odd and obscure stuff, but this one stuck.
It said Prince Harry and Meghan bought their first home. One with nine bedrooms and 16 bathrooms.
Much time has been spent pondering why a nine-bedroom home would have 16 bathrooms.
Say there’s an en-suite for each of the bedrooms. Cool.
Then there’s a pool and a tennis court bathroom. A guest one or two, for a tally of 13.
What are the rest for? Maybe dotted around so they can make pit stops when going from one side of the 18000-square-foot (1672.2m) house to another.
Set on two hectares of Montecito, California, land, it cost $14650000 (R255255000).
It has ancient olive trees, rose gardens, a tennis court, a tea house, children’s cottage and a pool.
Inside, apart from the bedrooms and bathrooms, it has a library, office, separate dry and wet sauna, gym, game room, arcade, theatre, wine cellar and five-car garage.
There is also a two-bedroom guest house, presumably with three bathrooms. It’s not clear whether these loos were included in the tally.
Being a decidedly non-rich self-cleaning person, my first thought was: imagine keeping it all clean. But of course, if one can afford above-mentioned home, one could employ an army of staff.
Another puzzle is: why? Two adults and a toddler rattling around from one place to another. Harry is probably used to rattling around Buck Pal and assorted castles.
But with everything one could possibly want, one would never have to leave the place.
Perhaps that’s the cunning privacy plan: huge savings on bodyguards, high-end fashion and beauty requirements, and fancy face masks in the Covid-stricken States.
I’m still bogged down by the loos, but there’s another curiosity that’s been taking up some brain power - the (lifted) cigarette ban in South Africa.
The government missed a huge trick with this ban, and not only in monetary terms. They could have moved thousands of smokers off the leaf and onto a much healthier (not healthy, but healthier) alternative.
A Friend smoked for 40 years. Tried everything - gum, patches, sprays, pills, cold turkey - several times, to quit, and none overcame the addiction. Then, after suffering bouts of pneumonia, too many cases of bronchitis, this Friend turned, with scepticism, to an e-cigarette.
It was hard after so many years.
But for 15 months on the ecig, this Friend could breathe, no wheezing, no illness, no hacking cough, no stinky smell. My Friend was overjoyed. Then the ban hit.
My Friend turned criminal and took whatever was available.
It was stinky and the chest was soon back to hacking and wheezing.
If ecigs were available during the ban, smokers could have made the change and reaped the benefits, and kept money flowing into the state coffers. And there would be much more goodwill to our rulers.
Said Friend queued to stock up and, in a run like there was on toilet roll at the beginning of the Covid-19 crisis, stockpile in case there’s another reversal.
Then watch the goodwill evaporate like vapour.
* Slogrove is the news editor
The Independent on Saturday