A few weeks ago I turned 39. I know. It’s barely worth mentioning: 39 is a Queen’s Club Championships of a birthday, the kind whose mention simply prompts a conversation about the next one to come. My son, however, started asking about it early. ‘When’s your birthday?’ he asked, four months ago. ‘November,’ I told him. ‘So,’ he asked, ‘in November you’ll be 40?’ ‘No,’ I told him, ‘39. Thirty-nine. I’ll be 39,’ with rather more vehemence than was strictly dignified.
Soon, he started asking me what I wanted as a gift, and I tried to restrict my answers to things he could manage himself. ‘I’d love it if you wrote me another book about your Lego sets,’ I said, ‘maybe one with me in it.’ He reacted to this low-stakes request as if I’d just demeaned the entire purpose of birthdays and started suggesting more expensive things like ‘trainers’ and ‘laptops’ and – struggling to think of other interests I might have – ‘a special, very big bottle of wine’. I told him those would all be fine presents, but I didn’t think he could afford them. He seemed shocked by this and said: ‘What about the rocket?’
‘The rocket’ is a ceramic piggy bank in the shape of a spaceship, which we acquired from a Center Parcs holiday five years ago. It has periodically been filled with coins – and the occasional euro banknote – so intermittently, in fact, that I frequently forget it’s there. Its status as secret black hole of money is doubly ironic, since it was acquired during a pottery class we were not told would cost us €70 (plus another €60 to bring home the resulting, execrable adventures in earthenware produced by this exercise). These days, I only remember that its fuselage contains money at all because of our daughter.
At two, she handles more cash than any of us, since we often un-pop the base of that malformed, multicoloured rocket so that its dragon’s hoard of coppers spills out and she can restock it, coin by coin. This she does, with the dead-eyed glaze of a Floridian retiree depositing their grandkids’ inheritance into a Vegas slot machine, until she’s done – at which point, we pop off the base and do it all again.
I haven’t used coins myself for years, so each time I let them spill on to the table – to occupy her while I stir some pasta, or stare off into space – I think of the fact I barely consider them currency. As recently as 2015, I’d never made a contactless payment, in my entire life but now the idea of paying with cash is a hilarious anachronism, on a par with commuting via penny farthing to my job hunting whales from a blimp.
That’s no such issue for my son, who has apparently been thinking about that cold, hard cash every day of his life – admittedly, in this instance, for my benefit. We get home and he tumbles through it. In total, there’s a little over £6 and about €11. I’m about to tell him this won’t be enough for a laptop, but he’s already reaching for his pen set with a pitying look on his face. ‘I’ll write you a book,’ he says.
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