Just as the Dark Knight has its European Premiere in Leicester Square, news comes to Londonist of a different sort of Joker in town. Same wheels, different agenda.
The jovial character in question is a wealthy Arab. He may have thought he was buying into the Batman legend when he purchased his Batmobile (actually a Lamborghini Murcielago), but he doesn’t seem entirely to have cottoned on to that saving-the-planet ethos that we have come to expect of Bruce Wayne. Realising that his Qatar based vehicle was getting a bit low on oil and perhaps needed its tyres pumped up a bit, he flew the whole thing to London at a cost of £20,000 (return) for a £3,352 service.
We barely have to spell out the ecological daffiness of this, and we are sure that he will end up in carbon purgatory. But a bit of us kind of has to agree with the spokesman from Lamborghini Club UK when he says:
"I'm not surprised. Thankfully the age of excess in some areas continues.."
We need excess by which to define deprivation. We need these ridiculously wealthy sorts, who burn money to keep warm, to reassure the rest of us as to how noble we are, how virtuous, how abstemious. And to remind us that ultimately that life should be fun and that money is a joke.
Still, it’s a good job we’re not all quite as extravagant with our fuel consumption, otherwise we’d be looking at a very different sort of Dark Night.
Batmobile from Cristiano Betta’s flickr stream under the Creative Commons Licence.
