21/05/2026
11! My second son was eleven today. As the third of five children, my wife sometimes amusingly refers to him as the middle finger. In a way he was: When you’re a parent of two young children, parenthood for you and your peer group is still new, it’s plagued with inexperience and doubt. After a year, or even five, you and those around you might think you have a handle on it but I don’t think (even now) you ever really do or will. When your wife deliberately falls pregnant with a third child — before your eldest is even five (and especially after you have both a daughter and a son — as though that alone was the A to Z) for some reason however, especially amongst those with a young child or two themselves, a third child (even in the most polite circles) seems to beg the question of whether conception was REALLY intentional. “Don’t you have a TV” “Are you Catholic?” In a country with an aspirational middle class which absolutely ballooned in the UK as a result of Thatcherism, and which I’m a obvious byproduct, I can say, that in my experience now, the biggest fallacy is this bourgeois notion of only having the kids you think you can afford. That’s bu****it. It thrives on the fact that to afford the modern bourgeois life you want to live, and give to your kids, you will need a lot of money. More than you’ll ever have. The problem with money is that no one ever feels that they have enough of it. The problem with modern life is that we spend the money we do have on s**t we don’t need. Everyone I know now talks about how they didn’t have things as a child (and that that made them better people!) Isn’t that proof of some deep truth. If it is, then at least I had three more kids that I was never expected to afford and that naturally give me more joy than anything else. Looking at my son, and the photos of his childhood (in any but that context especially) I wouldn’t trade them for a future of financial security. Who in their right, supposedly well-educated, bourgeois mind ever would. My kids have taught me almost everything I think of actual value. Despite facts, memory and this diatribe I don’t claim to know anything - my kids taught me the important stuff.
