How much is enough? The question has been rattling around in my head of late. I spent last week in a very poor country, and this week in a very rich one. The culture shock has driven me nuts.

I'll put it another way: what is rich? I have always thought that if you could meet your financial responsibilities without undue strain, and have a little left over towards your old age, you were rich indeed. On that basis, I have been rich all my life, because I have always been willing to work as hard as was required to reach that condition ? but not much more. Once I got to where I needed to be, I stopped work and went home for the day.

My experience in a poor country taught me that some people, no matter how hard they work, will never reach that state if the government fails to do its job. Then I flew to Canada, and accidentally fell into the lap of luxury. The whiplash did me in.

I'm staying in a hotel in Toronto (well, I would, wouldn't I?) on my annual vacation. Because I belong the to the hotel's frequent stayer club (it's free, you just have to sign up), I was given the best available room in the house, a suite, no less. My room is 70 feet long and, at its widest, probably 50 feet wide. My whole apartment is not that big. The cost of the suite is the same as that of a regular room, Canadian $189 a night.

The size of the room didn't throw me too far off, although I kept looking around for the 12 other people I assumed I'd be sharing with. It's the bed that has done my brain in. It is wider than it is long. It's probably king size, although no king ever enjoyed such luxury, not even King Midas. If I had a wife and three kids, we could all sleep comfortably in the bed and none of us would ever hear the others snoring.

It's ridiculous. It is, in a nutshell, Too Much. For me and for anyone.

As I have grown older, hotel rooms and beds have grown larger and larger. For all I know, business travellers now expect all this luxury. Personally, I'd rather pay less and just have a regular bed. But then I'm such an ordinary Joe. Sigh.

Being on my hols, I have had time to think. Thoughts of Too Much turned my mind turned to the Enron execs who are now facing the rest of their lives in jail. Here were men (and maybe women, although I can't recall one being charged at Enron) who had vast personal fortunes and gigantic annual salaries, the financial equivalent of my giant bed. And yet, for these greedy pigs, Too Much didn't even begin to approximate to enough. They stole more. And more. And more. They didn't worry about anyone other than themselves, and had they not been caught, they'd still be stealing now.

Why? Greed. Good old-fashioned greed. Biblically proscribed greed. Gigantic personality flaws, driven by a culture in which Too Much is never enough. For all I know, these guys all had emperor-sized beds.

May they rot in hell. Not just because they ruined the lives of some 80,000 Enron employees with their unmitigated avarice, bad enough though that was. But because guys like that spoil everything for the rest of us. They make us think that, unless we too have emperor-sized beds, we are failures. You don't have a BMW or Jaguar? You must be a loser. Don't have $80 million in the bank? You've failed. Let the side down. This is a perversion of reality that plays into the greed that lurks inside all of us, but which most of us keep under control most of the time. Television shoulders some of the blame, but guys like the Enron thieves intensify our feelings of failure.

Mr. Lay, the chief villain of the Enron piece, continued to deny his guilt after being convicted, even though to the rest of us, it was blindingly apparent. Maybe he felt entitled to take home whatever wasn't bolted down. Maybe he felt that because he had created wealth for others, his rewards should be unlimited. But he had a huge salary, and an unlimited expense account, and a jet, and God knows what else, and for this greedy, greedy man, Too Much was not enough.

For the rest of us, the possibility of saving some money as the result of our hard work should be enough. No one needs an emperor-sized bed. It should exist as a reward for anyone who wants one and earns it, just as I have by saving my beans and choosing to spend them in the Marriott in Toronto. There will follow four months of living in my regular shack, minding the pennies, where I enjoy the great luxury of a regular double bed, in case Julia Roberts needs somewhere to stay at short notice. I am deeply grateful to live squarely in the middle of the great balance sheet of life.

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm a failure. But I have set the meter of success to read "double bed" and, having achieved it, am grateful. If I continue to work hard, I should be able to afford a double bed for the rest of my life. And that will be Enough. For that, and so many other mercies, may the Lord make me truly thankful.

Amen.