This article was written for Annabel & Grace, which is now part of Rest Less.
In idle moments when you are having a snooze, do you sometimes think about what your life would be like swapping lives with someone?
“I could happily live her life”. Have those thoughts floated into your mind?
I once kissed a Duke (no names here); he wasn’t a Duke then but a mere Marquess. Could I have been a Duchess? My OH soon put paid to that fantasy as he said I would never have made it as there were too many skeletons in my cupboard, and the media would have dug them out. Anyway, I was listening to the podcast Duchess, which is by the Duchess of Rutland. Emma Rutland interviews other Duchesses who are running large stately homes. It all sounded very much like hard work and a bit cold. Can you imagine their heating bill this winter?
My OH thinks he would have made a pretty good Neil Diamond, and so we have to be careful when there is a microphone around at a party. Our daughter, who is getting married next year, espied her Dad on the mike at another wedding and quickly told him that “there are rules for her own wedding.” Good luck, Jordi, as when your Dad sees the band, he will be up on the stage faster than you can say, ‘I do.’ He was once mistaken for Bob Dylan in the South of France and got 5* service at the patisserie, but when they discovered he was just ordinary old Ed, the bag-to-car service ceased.
Of course, we would all like to have been the person who invented something clever and lived off the royalties. For example Josh Wardle who invented Wordle and then sold it to the New York Times a few months later for a undisclosed sum “in the low seven figures”
I sometimes listen to the Lottery results and imagine winning but it would be hard as I never play. Recently there was someone who won £109 million on the Lottery. Imagine waking up and seeing that sum in your bank account. As Grace says you would have to give lots to charity.
However, with the win, there would inevitably be a downside. Expect a flurry of unspeakable relations or long-lost friends to emerge (lost because you didn’t want to find them) who would be making a bee-line for your door.
I remember reading Michelle Obama’s auto-biography – yes, fantasising about being the First Lady has also entered my imagination, and the part where she says she will never be totally on her own again had dawned on her. She will always have a large security protection, and after the recent stabbing of Salman Rushdie, I am sure it will have been increased. No, that life is not for me. I like my walks on my own and the freedom that I have. However, I would like her arms – wow, she has incredible-shaped upper arms, no worries about sleeveless dresses there. I admire them as I have had an arm fracture for the second time in five years and am working very hard to get the muscles working again, though I think her tone is out of my grasp.
Finally, if I get to choose in my next life I would like to come back as one of our dogs. I mean, they have no worries in the world, and their life is totally enviable. Two meals a day, a daily dog walk and endless treats. Our lives revolve around them.
We nurture a bevvy of local ladies who will care for them if we are going somewhere which is not dog-friendly. I know; how could we even contemplate going anywhere without them?
To be perfectly honest, OH and I are thinking of having a major lifestyle change and the only thing that is holding us back, apart from the Greek man who is being quite tricky about selling us his house, are the dogs. Will they enjoy Corfu? We will have to drive every time we want to go to Corfu. And then there is this Greek ‘tick’ which is much more virulent than their English cousins. Plus, of course, the snakes. Actually, they are also on my ‘con’ list.
So at the end of the day, I think I will stick with my life because I love it, albeit that it is currently like running a hotel as our front door is constantly revolving with my children and their partners turning up and disappearing a few days later. But the grass is never greener on the other side of the fence especially at the moment with the drought!!
Who would you like to life-swap with even just for a week?
More articles from Annabel here