Money

Making money

You can't take it with you - Diamonds are forever

Elizabeth Taylor wearing the 69-carat diamond given to her by husband Richard Burton in 1968

Investments done rather better than expected, have they? Or won the lottery, maybe? To show that you care, you could shower a little of those riches on the woman in your life. And how? Is there really any need to ask? Diamonds are a girl's best friend. The bigger the diamond the better, presumably, the friend, writes Julian Champkin

But wouldn't a diamond as big as the Ritz be rather vulgar? That rather depends on who is wearing it. Consider the 69-carat monster - all right, maybe that is only half as big as the Ritz, but it is still pretty big - that in 1968 was Richard Burton's million-pound-plus gift to his wife Elizabeth Taylor. (They divorced six years after the gift, but then they married each other again; Ms Taylor evidently felt the diamond had sentimental value, because she kept it and only sold it after their second divorce.)

The stone got named, naturally enough, the Taylor-Burton diamond. Princess Margaret called it "the most vulgar thing I have ever seen". La Taylor met the princess at a party and asked if she would like to try the ring on. The ring changed fingers. It sparkled on the princess’s royal digit; and Liz Taylor said cheerfully "It doesn't look so vulgar now, does it?"

So size alone may not be quite enough in a diamond (though it would be rude to turn one down just because it was too big.) But if you want to show that you are cultured rather than merely rich you are just slightly too late to buy your true love a rather special diamond. They make artificial diamonds now. They make them from carbon - any form of carbon will do. Specifically, they have made one from the carbon in Beethoven’s hair.

You take a strand of his hair from a carefully-preserved locket of it, obtained (how else?) from a millionaire collector of antique lockets of hair in America; it has been documented and authenticated as from the great man. You burn off everything except the carbon in it; you squeeze the carbon under huge pressure, and at temperatures pushing 2,000 degrees C, for six months or so, until it turns into a round-brilliant cut, 0.56-carat blue diamond. Then you auction it off on eBay.

The winning bid was a cool $202,700. A bargain price, surely, for the one remaining bit of the composer that will never now decompose.