Are you living the life of Riley? If so then lucky you. Most of know someone who is living the life of Riley, someone who has never had it so good.
If you know someone who always looks like the cat that got the cream, then they are living the life of Riley chances are - someone for whom life is going really well and better than they could have expected, like a judge along the Len Goodman lines on Strictly Come Dancing who suddenly is getting ridiculous sums of money for talking about what he's always loved - dancing - and no wonder that Bruno Tolioni guy has so much energy and grinning all the time, he's living the true life of Riley.
What's the origin of the phrase, then?
Well it comes from a song by Patrick Rooney where a dreamer called Reilly dreamt about making it rich. The idea stuck and people started to talk about and dream about for themselves living the life of Reilly for real, which became anglicised to the life of Riley, and now we are all jealous of people who live that life whilst we must all soldier on with our day jobs, writing phrase descriptions for websites, and the like.
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