A column about babies

At first there were none, and everything was peaceful. Then, the first one showed up, and then another, and I began to worry. Then, as the years passed, more and more reports of their impending arrival flooded in, and I began to panic. Now, it’s clear that they will win, and it’s only a matter of time. Nearly everyone will succumb, and although I’ll hold out for as long as I can, I realise that one day too, I will give in.

I’m not talking about an alien invasion – well, not quite. I’m talking about babies. A few months short of my thirty-second birthday, many of my friends are new parents, and the signs are clear that within a year or two, they’ll constitute a majority. Already, there is a worrying shortage of people to stay out late and do foolish things with, and it’s clearly just a matter of time until the invasion of the body snatchers (well, they invade their mothers’ bodies for nine months, anyway) is complete.

Last weekend, I went to a beachside barbeque and met, for the first time, the freshly-minted offspring of some of my oldest friends. All the kids were cute, and all the parents were tired but delighted by the additions to their families. The conversation centred, naturally, on parenthood. Funny stories and helpful parenting tips were exchanged, and everyone just seemed so – what’s the word – happy.

So I sat there awkwardly, not having much to contribute to the conversation. I didn’t dare to actually handle any of the babies, of course, because of the clear and present danger of being covered in drool or worse, and also because I couldn’t remember how not to drop them. Ultimately, I retreated to the one place that was guaranteed to be a baby-free zone – the barbeque itself, where I talked to a few other babyless refugees about a range of non-baby subjects. It came as sweet relief.

As I watched the grilling sausages, I thought about how ironic this situation was. At uni, I’d been one of the younger, dorkier members of this particular social group, and felt my relative lack of wildness keenly. (This was before I started writing for The Glebe, of course, and my membership of the A-List became indisputable.) But nowadays, I’m one of the few who’s regularly awake in the early hours of the morning for reasons other than a crying baby. So, I felt a little out of place again, just as I had in those early days of getting to know them, but for the opposite reason. I wasn’t the square guy, sitting in the corner at a party in the backyard of some terrace house, looking at people who were cooler than me. Now I was the sociable guy whose friends had inexplicably swapped mixing cocktails for baby formula. I was feeling tired and had bags under my eyes because I’d been up half the night with some friends, but the bags under their eyes were substantially bigger because they’d been up with a screaming baby.

But as the afternoon progressed, I realised something. The parents were looking at me, partnerless and with no prospect of scoring a baby of my own except through misadventure or outright theft, and they still felt a little sorry for me. Once again, I was missing out on the richness they had in their own lives, and once again, I couldn’t be a full member of the club. It wasn’t that they thought it was cool to have babies and that I was lame because I didn’t. It was more that they’d stopped caring about what was cool, because they had more important things – and people – to worry about now.

As I drove home, I tried to calculate exactly how far away I was from reproducing. Even if I’d met someone suitable at that very barbeque, it’d surely take me at least four years to get through all the stages of committing, moving in together, perhaps marrying, and then actually managing to produce a kid. And then, at another barbeque with these friends in five years’ time, my kid would be the odd one out, sitting in a pram helplessly while all the older kids ran around and played games. And I realised that if I want to give my child every chance, including the opportunity to be the cool older one in the group that their old dad never had, there are only two solutions: adoption, and finding some younger, daggier friends.

A column about Lehman Brothers

This may shock regular readers, given the extraordinary breadth of my wisdom in almost all areas of life, but I really don’t get the world financial system. Generally, it seems to make a lot of fairly unpleasant, money-obsessed people even richer than they already are, and far richer than they could ever need to be. But then, occasionally, it goes utterly pear-shaped in a matter of days, and the very same people start tearing their hair out and donning sackcloth and ashes. Zegna sackcloth, of course, but sackcloth nevertheless.

The collapse of Lehman Brothers this week made me remember a slightly less high-profile fraternal financial failure, that of the Leyland Brothers. And more specifically, their World, a theme park up north of Newcastle. As with Lehman, it failed partly because of dodgy loans, or at least one dodgy loan – theirs. The one-time TV stars couldn’t make their repayments in that early 90s “recession we had to have”, so had to turn the place over to the Commonwealth Bank. Lehman Brothers lasted for 150 years, but Leyland Brothers World only lasted 18 months.

And yet its memory lives on to this day because of its major attraction, a one-fortieth scale model of Uluru made out of red-painted cement. All those who pass turn their heads to laugh briefly at it before continuing on towards Coffs Harbour, and those few of us who recall the Brothers and their World reflect with a little wry amusement, tinged with not inconsiderable pathos, on the enormous folly of sinking your life savings into a massive concrete model of Ayers Rock.

As the largest bankruptcy in US history, Lehman Brothers’ failure in similarly difficult times is more newsworthy than the collapse of Leyland Brothers World. But while their renenue may have been $59 billion in 2007, what do they have to show for their century and a half? Not so much as a giant concrete Ayers’ Rock. All they’ve done is shuffle money around. Generally they did this fairly well, and were compensated obscenely for it. This year, they did so very badly, and the firm went under.

Really, it’s hard to have much sympathy for anyone who works there, except for perhaps the cleaners. The bankers who were responsible will have fat savings to see them through, and perhaps use their enforced break for a round-the-world trip or something. But the maintenance staff, who are never responsible, are always the ones who suffer most when things go belly-up.

I don’t really know that many of us ever sat down and explicitly agreed to these terms of this deal, but capitalist economies are essentially casinos. Egomaniac businessmen such as the new Leader of the Opposition convince themselves that they’re brilliant, and their famous firms are unsinkable, but there is no profit without risk, and sometimes your number comes up. Look at the ancient Barings Bank, banker to the British monarchy, which was sunk by one young idiot in the Singapore office. And really, if you meet a few young bankers, you will know that in that profession, idiots are not exactly in short supply.

I’m glad that Lehman Brothers was allowed to founder, because those are the rules of the game. And if any of our local equivalents do the same, I won’t have much sympathy. Especially if Macquarie Bank fails, as predicted by one analyst last week. Because really, what did Macquarie ever do for any of us other than toll the living daylights out of us?

I don’t own a single share in a publicly listed company because I’m scared of days like last Thursday, when the market slumps unexpectedly as all the supposedly ice-cold, ultra-rational traders run around like headless chooks selling everything. Then in a day or two, everyone calms down, and it bounces back. What kind of way is that to run a world economy.

At least when you invest in property, you get a place that can keep the rain off your head. And a space in which you can actually have a modest chance at happiness. I don’t see anyone getting much joy out of their share certificates. Which are essentially scratchies, only without even a cheesy illustration of a cartoon cat on them.

So when I’m a poor ancient writer, and I’m joined in the soup kitchen queue by poor ancient bankers who’ve been reduced to my level by the unpredictability of the world economy, I’ll take pleasure in pointing out that at least I’ll be survived by a bunch of columns in The Glebe, my legacy to future generations. But I doubt that 150 years of shuffling funds at Lehman Brothers have left much behind them at all.