Pocket money should have been a good lesson for life

A Different View with Dave O’Connell

Whatever happened to the notion of pocket money – the fifty pence you got on a Thursday evening that had to do you for the next week?

You could splurge it all on Shoot! magazine and make the best of it until the next edition came around, or you could space it out and spend it on penny bars or liquorice pipes to dip in sherbet – the choice was entire yours.

Incidentally, if you saw someone eating white sherbet powder on the end of a black liquorice pipe now, you’d assume it they were doing serious drugs – how times have changed.

But the bottom line on pocket money was, once it was gone, it was gone – and there was no point pleading for more because you needed to but sweets of a Saturday.

The odd time, during summer, a wafer of vanilla ice cream might come your way but outside of exceptional circumstances, you budgeted for your week better than any Minister for Finance has ever managed.

Now it’s cash on demand – ‘I need money for books/football boots/a soccer match/a disco/drinks for the bus going to the soccer match/a new Playstation game’ – and the notion of saving or delaying this instant gratification is as alien as Fingers Fingleton without a fat cat pension.

Or maybe that’s just me living in a parallel universe, because recent research in the UK showed that the amount of pocket money children receive there is actually on the up – to an average of just over twelve quid, but peaking at £22 during the school holidays.

Unless they’ve started smoking at an age where it can still stunt their growth, you’d wonder what kids need £22 for – particularly when they will still tap you up for everything they need as they need it.

Of course as teenage years give way to the acne era, the money probably goes on cheap beer or Buckfast which is a horse of a whole different colour – but it might explain why the same survey showed children claiming that, on average, they need twice as much as they’re getting to meet their weekly needs.

There used to be the option of supplementing your pocket money with a part-time job – filling petrol or a few hours in a shop; if you lived in a city you might take on a paper round, or if you lived where I did in Oughterard you looked forward to May when you could catch those little Mayflys with a cheap net and flog a shoebox full of them to visiting anglers.

These days, actual jobs are hard to come by, never mind part-time posts for bored teenagers – and anyway, how will you ever progress to the next level in Call of Duty if you cannot spend the entire summer on the Playstation?

Maybe it’s the onset of middle age, but there is no notion of waiting for something to happen anymore – back in the day the anticipation of Christmas morning began sometime in November; now you can go to a toy store on December 22 and you’ll see kids getting toys three days before Santa arrives down their chimney with another full delivery.

If you were unlucky enough to be born in December, you’d find that Christmas and birthday presents eventually rolled into one – because you couldn’t expect double gratification within two weeks of each other. Now they’d be ringing Childline if you came up with that excuse.

And yet I remember the joys of pocket money because I was one of those who spent it before it burned a hole in my pocket.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.