It’s my fault we’re stuck with these indolent girls

On Thursday, I sat opposite approximately 12 (though there may have been more) of those big-eyed, snub-nosed, rosebud-lipped, long-limbed girls that London and the Home Counties spawn so exclusively, so pointlessly but so well.

I was at a fashion show, obviously, which is the only time my life would conceivably overlap with theirs, mine consisting, as it does, of work interspersed with quick trips to Costcutter to buy more cling film. All of us were transfixed by the spectacle of so much idleness sitting side by side in one place. "Who's the blonde?" one editor hissed, surely the stupidest question of all time.

And then came Pippa Middleton. This girl is remarkable for nothing more than being the sister of the woman who might marry Prince William, yet when she arrived, you would think it was the second coming.

Why are we so interested in girls who do nothing? What, precisely, are we interested in? I recently posed this question to my husband and he gave me the sort of look you might reserve for Peter Andre if he asked you how to boil an egg. "Nobody is interested in these girls, except journalists," he pronounced, before turning back to War and Peace.

Can this be true? Can it really only be me and my sad little friends who find Sophie-Rose-Alice-Charlotte-Katie-Pippa-Bella as fascinating as rare marmots at the zoo? But who could fail to be interested in such a modern-day anomaly as the girl who doesn't have to work for a living? Maybe Kate Middleton would become a lot more boring (if that were possible) if she actually got a job, for it would place her in the real world with the rest of us.

As people flee the City clutching cardboard boxes full of stolen stationery and mouldy Starbucks mugs, these privileged few become still more fascinating (and irritating). Imagine not having to worry about the mortgage! Imagine being able to afford to go to the hairdresser every week, so that you never had roots!

In the olden days, the rich stayed in their castles while the poor toiled down below. Not any more. These days, the rich fall out of nightclubs and go rollerskating just like the rest of us, their every move chronicled in the papers so that we can drool over their luck and good fortune while feeling miserable about our own. The whole thing is very sick. You would think, given the vast amount of column inches accorded to them, that these "daughters of" represented something more than just a teeny, infinitesimally small proportion of British society. But they don't. And so I rather fear that my interest in them is something that shames me. Instead of Tatler, I shall try to read War and Peace. It's just a shame there aren't any pictures.