I lay awake at 4 a.m., lost in overthinking.
It’s a very British instinct to look at someone else’s big house and conclude they must be morally defective.
We pretend it’s about ‘waste of space,’ but really it’s our national sport: quietly judging other people’s square footage while pretending we’re above such things.
Some people like big houses for the same reason others like tiny cottages with ceilings so low you need to duck to think — personal taste, comfort, hobbies, noise levels, teenagers, in-laws, or simply because they can.
Not every spare room is a shrine to greed; sometimes it’s just storage, sanity, or somewhere to hide from your own family.
And calling it ‘pointless’ feels a bit rich in a country where half of us hoard Tupperware lids that fit absolutely nothing.
Humans are not known for perfectly rational use of space.
You don’t have to want a mansion — most people don’t — but liking one doesn’t automatically signal moral decay.
Some people want vineyards, some want allotments, some want a boot room the size of Wales.
That’s the joy of choice.
If anything, it’s very on-brand for Britain that the real outrage isn’t about corruption or tax policy, but the possibility that someone, somewhere, might have a dining room they don’t use every day.
At the end of the day, other people’s houses only become a ‘problem’ when we start mistaking our personal preferences for universal morality — which, funnily enough, is far more cramped than any mansion.