What on earth does Al Fayed do to spend up to £120,000 a week?

"It's hampers and champers all round," said Mohamed Al Fayed following his High Court victory in the libel action taken against him by former Tory MP Neil Hamilton. Fortunately that will probably leave him change for a packet of Woodbines.

Whereas Britain's foremost legal brains battled over the minutiae of Mr Hamilton's £65 sterling (€100) mini-bar bill, it was revealed earlier in the trial that Mr Fayed was drawing up to £120,000 a week in petty cash. What on earth can he spend it on? In fact, what can anybody do with a hundred grand a week, assuming they've already got the jets, houses, cars and bodyguards? Becks and Posh are struggling to get rid of their combined fortune, and they don't own Harrods or the Paris Ritz.

There is, after all, a limit to the number of Gucci sarongs and Hermes chewing gum holders that any one man can possess. There is even a finite number of Prada shoes and bottles of Jo Malone toilet water that one woman can buy.

At first, the task might seem an easy one. Start the week on Sunday morning with a Bloody Mary (£2.50). Hold it - where's the Bloody Mary kit. Chelsea jeweller Theo Fennell will sell you one for £12,500. This includes a silver tabasco holder, silver vodka bottle holder and a couple of silver swizle sticks. And while you're there, why not buy a silver replica of your Marlin fishing boat for £50,000?

Of course, it is possible to go mad the first week - wouldn't we all? There are guns from Holland & Holland at £30,000 a pair, £230,000 Bentleys (that will leave you short for the next week, of course), and the Patek Philippe Minute Repeater watch with diamond-encrusted face and 18-carat gold strap at £500,000.

In the half-mile surrounding Mr Fayed's Knightsbridge keep, it is possible to buy a solid-gold golf putter for more than £10,000, a gold toothbrush for £2,000 and an 18-carat gold Pez holder with carved agate Jerry mouse head for £11,000. At Connolly, the exclusive Belgravia leather goods shop, you can even get an espresso machine housed in a leather case that works from the car cigarette lighter for £600.

The problem is what to do with your £120,000 in your second and subsequent weeks.

Twenty years ago, a book was published in New York titled $500 a Day Before Lunch. The title is self-explanatory; the catch was that you had to spend the money without buying anything of value. You could not give the money away or invest it. A score of print and television journalists attempted to fritter away the money, but all failed. Similarly, in the 1945 film Brewster's Millions, a young man has to spend a million dollars in two months with similar restrictions, or forfeit an even larger fortune. He finds out quickly that it's much harder than you'd think to get rid of huge sums of cash.

Of course, there are still artworks and antiques to buy. A Damien Hirst will set you back around £180,000 - just ask Marco Pierre White, who sold his Hirst in December for just under 200 grand. Mind you, Marco has been known to charge a small fortune for a portion of chips. So if you eat at his restaurant every day - off the menu, of course - and slosh the grub down with a 1966 Chateau Margaux (£800-£1,000 a bottle in a restaurant), even a Ritz bill will seem a mere bagatelle.

And there are other things you can throw money at, like a custom-made Pininfarina Ferrari (the Sultan of Brunei wouldn't be seen without one). A day's grouse shooting will cost at least £1,000 (excluding the petrol for the Range Rover and the £20 tip for the loader). A game of golf at Loch Lomond will set you back a couple of hundred pounds - if you're allowed in (membership is over £10,000). Nor is it cheap to race a horse, smoke Cohiba cigars (£12 each), eat Beluga caviar by the tablespoonful or drink 1811 De Grande Armee Napoleon cognac (£250 a glass).

Mr Fayed doesn't just get rid of his wealth; he gets rid of it in cash. That's the folding stuff we used to use - remember? A normal rectangular briefcase full of cash, in £50 notes, will only hold £250,000. And nobody would actually sell you a £650,000 McLaren F1 for three briefcases of lucre. You only have to try and buy a bar of Floris soap from Harvey Nichols with a tenner to discover the class of cash.

Bookies, drug dealers and that chap in the Dog and Duck who wants to flog you a video may love the stuff, but the rest of the population mistrusts it. A tricky situation when £100,000 is burning a hole in your pocket on a Friday afternoon.

You can see how one might be driven to popping the odd bundle into a brown envelope.