No one is supposed to want to be alone anymore, Garbo-style. But they do. Last week, the will was read of the multimillionaire recluse Huguette Clark, who died in Manhattan aged 104. For decades, the copper mining heiress lived in self-imposed isolation in private hospitals with only her vast collection of French dolls for company. The investigative reporter Bill Dedman, who had been tracking her for years, said there was nothing wrong with her – she just didn't like public life. "She wasn't sick. She was reclusive. She made Howard Hughes seem outgoing."
Way to go, Huguette. No Twitter or Facebook for you. No indecision about whether it's antisocial to avoid LinkedIn on the grounds that it's rubbish. No sleepless nights worrying if you should ask one of your so-called Friends to un-tag you in a photo because you look particularly unattractive in it, so much so that the very fact of the tagging has made you wonder whether they're really any kind of Friend (or friend) at all. Indeed, no concerns about photos generally because you hadn't let anyone take one of you since 1930.
No worrying that you wore the same outfit last time you met your best friend for a drink. No blow-drying. Nor hair-straightening. Indeed, no bad hair days because no one ever saw you. Forget face-to-face neighbourly interactions too, since you hadn't visited your own house – a $100m mansion overlooking the sea in Santa Barbara – in more than 50 years. No children, no relatives, no hangers-on. What bliss.
The only person permitted occasional visits was the lawyer. And your only companion was a nurse – who inherits £21m. (There is a lesson there for the NHS. I'm just not sure what it is yet. Maybe try to entice very wealthy people who don't like their family not to go private and give them their own persuasive, charismatic ward sister?)
Of course, very few of us could live like Huguette Clark, even if we wanted to. And yet it's tempting to envy the choices her money bought her. (Her father – a copper tycoon from Montana – was second only to Rockefeller in his day.) Not only was Clark sealed off from public life, but she was also isolated from the flood of information. She had total control over what entered her universe: marionettes in frilly dresses and cartoons including The Flintstones. The life she lived was extreme. But think on this: she won't have known or cared who the Kardashians are. It's bold to embrace Pebbles, voluntarily, as one of your only cultural influences.
Last week, Margaret Atwood was asked: "How do we deal with the torrent of information that pours down on us all?" A fan of Twitter, Atwood is no dinosaur. She lives in the opposite of Clark's splendid isolation. But she cautioned against trying to gain any mastery over the avalanche: "Nobody ever gets quite the information they really want because often the information they really want is something they don't know they want."
Atwood's right. But Huguette Clark was even more right. In a world where we're always trying to keep up with everyone and everything, we lose sight of what really matters to us individually. True wealth is being able to determine your environment. We can't all live cut off in a private ward on the Upper East Side. But we can make better choices about what we let past the gates. Choose life, choose Barney Rubble.
Our language barrier
Despite living in New York most of her life, Huguette was raised in Paris and spoke English with an accent until the day she died. This was a level of Frenchness the contestants on last week's The Apprentice could only dream of. Still, Lord Sugar boomed hopefully: "I don't want any business of mine restricted to the UK market." Ah, toujours l'optimiste.
Even in cases where team members did believe they spoke French, they risked informing the Parisians they were vegetables. "I speak French. Un petit pois." But most were happy in their ignorance. Susan breezily bragged: "I know nothing about France. I don't speak a word of French apart from 'bonjour'."
In fact so little was known about this alien species, "the French", that Susan appeared to wonder if they were even vaguely human. "Do the French like their children?" "Do a lot of people drive in France?" Tom spoke for everyone when he said: "Hopefully, they'll speak English. I am looking forward to breakfast." He then made a crunching motion, as if to bite into a croissant. At least he possessed some knowledge: the French do good pastries.
Overall, the programme was the most embarrassingly horrific measure of the state of modern language learning in this country. Fewer than half of our pupils study a European language now, compared to 80% 10 years ago. The median age of The Apprentice candidates is 28. Several of them were at school when languages were not optional.
But even the older ones could not manage even a wimpish: "Excusez-moi, parlez vous anglais?"
Melody's example was fascinating. Her pidgin French had no grammar, her genders were all over the place, but people could more or less understand her. Leon hailed her as a multilingual goddess. "It's so impressive, like, that you can just speak to them and understand what they're saying back." That is indeed the point of a language interaction.
The education secretary has hinted at reintroducing languages as mandatory at GCSE. Monsieur Gove, please reconsider avec urgence. Don't just make languages compulsory. Make it punishable by death not to learn them and properly. Meanwhile, by the end Lord Sugar, head in hands, had modified his demands for internationalism. "I'm looking for someone who's got a brain." Bonne chance!
Victoria Coren is away