The news that English children say that more than $A5 is inadequate as weekly pocket money because of the price of lollies and comics, comes as no surprise.
The children I know have stopped writing to Santa Claus. They now write to the World Bank.
I found one of my grandchildren studying the stock exchange reports, Superman and Flash Gordon have slipped as his favourite characters. He now keeps pin-ups of Mr. Holmes a Court.
Of course, children apply the pressure to me in their sweet, endearing, lisping, materialistic fashion. They are right up with interest rates and takeovers.
I went to tell them a bedtime story, Pooh Bear, and male chauvinist Piglet and all the rest.
“We don’t want that,” they cried, “Read us your bank book.”
I made a note of it.
In my day when money had true value the weekly copies of Comic Cuts, Rupert the Chick (not related to the other Rupert) and Film Fun were my delight, painstakingly saved for with gritty pennies and halfpennies in an old jam jar. When these dazzling publications arrived with the groceries (and they smelt of flour and new bread and buns) I would take this gentle literature and sit spelling out the words while popping an acid drop or a boiled sweet into my tender young mouth. What dazzling captions I read. I guffawed madly with the on chooks joining in. Such were the simple pleasures of a country boy.
In my old age I am not so simple, surrounded as I am by kids with pocket calculator minds, and an innate understanding of the brutal mathematics of Star Wars.
Only this week I heard a couple of these mini-multinationalists discussing a takeover bid for me. They put my market value somewhere between a new football and a carton of Kiss ice blocks.
Granny,” one of them said, “Are you a shareholder in Grandpa?”
“Grandpa,” she said, “is in liquidation.”
Then she bawled at me: “Are you going to stay in the bath all day?”
But they still stood outside the bathroom door, waiting for the flow-on.
People around our way think thrift is a small creature that lives on plants.
Of course I’m sorry about the rise in lollies. Chocolate bars were fatter in my day. Now they’re thinner and I’m fatter. Isn’t it the darndest thing?
The whole family is caught up in the economic outlook.
“I’ve been studying the gross national product,” my wife told the neighbour. “How can I help it. I married him.”
She calls me her guilt-edged security.
Yesterday I heard the children having a rowdy game.
Showing my usual kindly interest I asked what it was.
“We’re playing stock markets,” one said, “I’m a bull and he’s a bear.”
Then they tried to get money from me.
I said: “I’m afraid trading has been suspended for the day.”
Now the national wage is going up and the kids are clamouring for more pocket money.
“What about your collateral?” they shriek at me.
Oh that. The last I heard of it, it was still in intensive care.
Max Fatchen