Late one evening last week, moved to candour by five or six pints, Matt Two Ducks Butler told Maxwell, the Professor and me that his wife has recently started taking multi-vitamins and something called folic acid. He knows this because she has been leaving the folic acid box lying around on the coffee table, as if he is to take an interest in it.

“She never did this with the pill,” he told us.

In addition, it seems she has begun introducing the subject of “family” into their conversation of late.

“I have a family, I tell her; but I know what she’s on about.”

“A couple of million years ago,” the Professor said to him, “when the earliest of your family were kicking around the dry equatorial plains of Africa, the thing that is presently impelling your wife was already long established. It is pointless to fight it.”

Despite the cheery note of crushing inevitability, Two Ducks still couldn’t summon any enthusiasm. In addition to the normal concerns about his adequacy in the proposed role of father, he was worried about exposing his heir to whatever the modern equivalents might be of those attitudes toward children that were so prevalent when we were growing up.

“Back then it was a well known and often aired fact,” he said, “that children spoiled everything. We were the flies, spanners, blots and millstones of every spiteful wiseacre’s hoary old metaphor. If it weren’t for the dictates of posterity no one, we were assured, would long have endured us. We were a bunch of insolent, greedy, thoughtless, cruel and self-centred liars, and while it seemed that nothing constructive could be done about it, other than wait and see if we’d grow out of it, we weren’t in the meantime going to be allowed forget our iniquities. We ate our corned beef sandwiches and tried to keep a lid on it, but given our inherent deformities, our success with this was only ever sporadic.”
Maxwell jumped in at that point with his own two cents, perhaps overcooking the irony for once, and suggested that Matt had little to worry about, in as much as children these days were recognised as people and treated accordingly. If someone had the temerity to refuse them due respect, there were institutions in place to protect them.

Three of us had a laugh at the idea of institutions protecting anybody, but the Professor, an older man than the rest of us, seemed to think it not so far fetched. As he saw it, the flipside of the abused urchins scenario seemed to be one where this army of little people strutted around in designer clothing, making arrangements by cellphone to do anything they want, whenever they want, and in whomsoever’s face they want.

“It’s deplorable,” he said, “and no one can do anything about it because those Renfields at the aforementioned institutions are protecting these larvae from the righteous retribution of the adult host, by blurring the line of demarcation between right and wrong, so that misguided dependants are turned into a recalcitrant, parasitic contagion.”

Needless to say the characterisation of the young as a freeloading disease didn’t reflect the majority of opinion in the snug, but when the Professor gets, as Two Ducks says, “a bit Schindlers”, he is wont to stagger backwards a little and to the right.

It was late in the evening and it may just have been the drink, but Two Ducks remained forlorn. “My experience of the breed is limited. I’m twenty years out of secondary school and a full quarter century out of primary. I can’t remember the last time I was on a bicycle that actually went anywhere, or was detained noncompliantly in front of a plate of poisonous vegetable matter. If my wife and I are, as they say, ‘blessed’, I can’t say I’ll have a huge amount to tell it. ‘Life is hard and then you die. Try to get your retaliation in first and be nice to women, they can help with the pain.’ And what if it’s a jaysus girl?”

I must confess that my own musings in this area are less bleak. I tend to envisage my prospective parenthood by casting myself as a fatherly amalgam of Bertrand Russell and Gregory Peck, confidently and epigrammatically steering the progress of the as yet unconceived and unnamed child to some as yet unimagined majesty. But then I’m only recently married and not on the front line in quite the way that Two Ducks is.

“The fact of the matter is that in order to pay for the house we’ll need, located two hours from work, my wife and I will be too busy to see much of the nipper. We’ll hand it off to the minder in the morning, and in the evening if we’ve been lucky with the traffic, we might get to tuck the little bundle in. During these early years we’ll have to work at memorising its face so we’ll be confident of being able to pick it out of a crowd, say if we brought it to a playground at the weekend or something. A few years after that it’ll be passed to the depressingly achievable national school, where despite our wish to bring it up as a stoical realist it’ll have to endure a lot of irrational mumbo-jumbo, because crippled with debt, our dream of saving enough to send it somewhere non-denominational will have come to nothing. When it finishes primary the team from Industrial and Corporate Utility Training get it for five years, and by the time it’s finally released from my legal obligation to train it for deployment in private industry, it’ll join together in college with the other malformed mutants this system produces. Finally, shot of that circle of hell, it can lease itself, body and mind, to an immortal legal entity, which will provide it with money with which to pay off its extensive loans. Then it’s forty-odd years of making the rich richer, at some point during which the missus and I will croak, which will at least earn the little wage slave the guts of a week’s compassionate leave.

“Of course it’s not all doom and gloom. If at any stage during one of our infrequent meetings the little bugger has the temerity to complain about its lot, I can say the thing I’ve been waiting years to say: ‘When I was your age….’”