No Joke.

Yesterday, had i accidentally found £2m in my Pay Packet- ok, Child Tax Credit Payment- i would have handed it in, absolutely no question. Not because 'the overpayment would have been traced within days and the employee asked to pay it back' (though, way to Fuck Up a perfectly adequate Owen Wilson/ Julia Roberts Box Office Bomb). No, because it is Stealing. Today, however, i'm keeping half. According to a new study, it should just about cover the majority of the cost of raising my five children to the age of twenty-one. Twenty- One? That's just the Eldest one, right? Then he presumably somehow drags up the rest in his wake?
 £210,000. And that's my children- we can probably knock off a bit on the thinking that Firstborn is Not 'Going to Contract', that Pedantic will have to wait for a garden with a Tree before he gets Treehouse, and that no one in this house will require their own Infant Counselor because their Daddies sang 'Candle in the Wind' at their Christening.
 If we leave aside the Baffling amount that the survey claims is spent on a child in its first 4 years, when, as far as i recall, mine were clothed mainly in the rags vacated by elder siblings and fed exclusively off my Very Life Blood, the Priciest Period is of course- No Fanfare, Absolutely No Ta-Daaah- the three years when they might be at University. If the Price tag inflates at the expected rate over the next 15 years, by the time i am packing my Youngest into the Vauxhall Corsa with a box of the Second- Best Saucepans, that might well be where we both live. So far my Plans include some hitherto overlooked Sponsorship Windfall aimed at the Very Argumentative, Smuggling him into Mia Farrow's and hoping he gets educated by accident, or voting the Coalition out and hoping that the Labour Party reverses the worst of the damage that is being done to Our Children's Future.

Instead of spending the projected hundreds of millions of pounds on the Nick Clegg's  Popularity Poll why doesn't the Government just ask a few people something more pertinent: like, do you want your children to have any kind of worthwhile future?  The alternative is just to wait on  the day when i have to look my sons and daughter in the eyes and admit that there is No Money- not just for Trainers, or MP3s, or for cars or laptops- but also no benefit safety net, nor further education that they can access, nor any jobs or trainee schemes or apprenticeships. No opportunities, no aspirations, no dreams. No punchline.