Tessa has just taken a break from a busy Savannah cider-guzzling holiday schedule to phone me from Howick. Reclining on a lawn chair, cider in hand, she has harangued me about breeding. I have been informed that her black-ringleted little cherub can melt the stoniest of hearts, and make a broody breeder of a bullet-proof bachelor at 100 paces. I have one or two doubts.
Boiled or Fried?
I do like children, but I could never eat a whole one. Other than basted or floured, I find them of dubious worth. Kids ruin your figure, and leave your boobs looking like kippers. In my experience, they knock over beers, fistedly scrawl “FaR t” on the couch with your girlfriend’s Dior lipstick, and make you feel bad when you blurt out ‘fuck’.
If I had a ZA Rondt for every woman who’s said to me, “But you’d make such a good dad. You’re so good with children” I’d have enough money to build 10 planned parenthood clinics. Thing is, the little critters do seem to find me a cool fun guy, but I can never stand them for longer than the next nappy change. Sorry, but I’m just too selfish.
My Own Private Pregnaho
In the autumn of my thirties, the biological clocks are clanging louder than a 12-pound hammer on the inside of a slowly flooding diving bell. It seems the whole world is pregnant, or has a little IQ-sapper on each hip. It’s like Shaun of the Dead but with ponderous phalanxes of pregnant or fussy pram-toting women instead of marching zombie hordes. A previously thriving conversational ecosystem of everything between heaven and earth topics has been wiped out by “being pregnant” or “the face of a child…” GM crop platitudes that make me feel like an atheist at a church barbeque. Can’t we deport all the pregnant woman to a US State that no one cares about, like say, Idaho? We could rename it “Pregnaho”. Oprah can be President for Life.
