Rosemary McLeod: $215k nothing against price some pay

Women shouldn't hide the true cost of housekeeping from their partners; they have to join the real world eventually.
Protecting them can cause embarrassment, as boyish Labour MP Chris Hipkins showed this week when he claimed the $275,000 cost of doing up the prime minister's Wellington residence was exorbitant.
How silly. Had he been paying the bills lately Mr Hipkins would know that $250,000 is the going rate for - oh, a cat vaccination, and had he shopped at any supermarket he'd know he'd be lucky to get a week's groceries for that - forgoing gourmet treats like fresh fruit, meat and all dairy products, of course.
"John Key and Bill English are telling ordinary New Zealanders that they have to live without 'nice to haves' and yet here we have the PM splashing out on new carpet and drapes. That reeks of hypocrisy to me," the former head prefect pouted.
Having had need of tradesmen in living memory, I didn't bat a world-weary lid at the $215,000 it cost to paint Premier House inside and out, the further $55,366.87 on new carpet, or a trifling $3065 for new blinds. In fact I'd call it a budget job. Mr Key lives modestly in Auckland, I gather, and I expect $250,000 doesn't go far in his own household, either, after Bronagh forks out for the odd bathroom deodorant or egg whisk.
Mr Key explained that the carpet at the Wellington digs had already been stretched a few times, and ridges had developed that became a safety issue. Bearing in mind that American Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited, we should be grateful she didn't snag her heels.
Prince William, too, called in on a recent trip. Imagine the impact on his nuptials if he'd tumbled and damaged sensitive anatomy.
Small, annoying countries like ours can't afford to take chances.
Back in my nick of the woods I was startled to see this week that lentils, that friend of household budgeters, have gone up to $10 a kilo.
Seriously, how do the rich get by?
If anyone doubts my account of the value of money they need only consider humble comedian John Cleese's alimony obligations. Cleese, 71, has been ordered to pay more than $24 million to his third wife, which, according to my usually shonky arithmetic is roughly $1.5 million a year for having shared his bed and tolerated his nocturnal tooth grinding for 12 years. By the look of his gnashers they'd put up one hell of a racket.
Cleese has famously spent years in psychotherapy (this former wife is a psychoanalyst) saying his aim is to understand women better. He now understands one of them exceptionally well, but with a few billion more women left in the world, he'd better get his skates on.
A digression: why are so many people keen to ogle images of Osama bin Laden's dead body, and what would they gain by it? Isn't it enough that we gawked at the crude execution of Iraq's former leader Saddam Hussein, conducted with such a shameful - and shaming - lack of gravitas? And should we also expect to gawk at images of the bodies of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi's son and three young grandchildren, slain during last month's air strike on his compound?
Saif al-Arab, 32, was admittedly a Gaddafi, but he was less known for his passionate politics than for his passionate partying in Germany, where the loud exhaust of his Ferrari greatly annoyed his neighbours. Which did he deserve to die for, his surname, his bad manners, or the fact that he'd survived an earlier Nato strike on his father's digs, when he was a nipper? If anything comparable happened to the family of a Western leader there'd be global outrage, but we seem to accept it with quiet satisfaction as a job well done.
Not so long ago Western countries were in the habit of displaying the severed heads of miscreants on pikes.
Recent events suggest we still have a taste for it.