HARVEY THOMAS | Opinion | Contact
Here I sit in the kitchen of my favourite home (which I probably have to refer to as they/them now) staring at an empty bowl of two minute noodles that my adult son didn’t even leave to soak, wondering how it all went wrong.
After years of significant growth, property prices are dropping like my enemies did during the pandemic and I can’t feel like a homebrewed case of tall poppy syndrome is to blame.
The housing market is collapsing and while many a “Millennial” will be raising a pint of lactose free potato milk to this market drop I will note that none of them have spared a thought about what this means for me and my deadshit kids who are waiting for me to die.
Like many Australians with a property portfolio, me and my wife Irene are ‘Mum & Dad’ investors. This means we have reproduced and reproduce we did, like a pair of Catholic cane toads we got at it, back before having children required a degree from the School of Wimps and a masters from Softcock University.
Luckily, mine and Irene’s children have not been anywhere near the aforementioned educational institutions or any educational institutions since they left the ones that I donated a literal library’s worth of funds to.
But there is more to being a ‘Mum & Dad’ investor than simply having children. It means you must be nice to us. We’re trying to get ahead the same as you and by golly we went and did it.
We beat you, fair and square.
We turned the crank and caught you in our mousetrap and now you’re crying foul because no one told you the rules. Well let me fill you in on a secret bub, no one knows the rules of bloody Mousetrap, it’s a last minute sixth birthday present and nothing more!
However, the rules have now turned against me and as someone with some actual skin in the game I think we can all agree that is atrocious.
The only reason I am allowed to see my earmuff wearing Peppa Pig injecting excuse for grandchildren is because I paid for the extension on my daughters house. That half a million dollars worth of approval is now only $475,000 worth of approval which is probably why she hasn’t responded to my latest meme about how Albo is a tosser.
It seems once again, my children are playing the long game and are waiting for my heart to explode on the golf course, Irene to go into aged care, and for them to all move into a property like the weak shell less hermit crabs they are.
One thing that you might not be taking into consideration is that my children have worked really hard to one day inherit my house. My eldest son, for example, invented a mattress that connects to bluetooth so you can know if your partner is mucking about behind your back. I did not make it past beta trials and he never finished filling out the form to get the patent sorted but at least he had a go and at least he stopped testing it on Irene and I. What an awful awful week that was.
These days however, he cannot even be bothered popping his two minute noodle bowl into the water saving dishwasher he insisted we get under threat of voting teal. It’s as if he knows the six million dollar estate he will inherit will be little over one million by the time he pays fees, splits it with his siblings, and pays Albo’s indefinite death tax.
This has completely crushed his dreams of becoming a self made millionaire.
And so the two minute noodles stay staring at me like an oriental omen (the flavour is oriental, don’t even try to cancel me woke mob!) of my own mortality. It lies dormant like the housing market and my children’s affection, a testament of the disappointment I will be in death to my children who have so disappointed me in life.
Harvey Thomas is The Advocate’s longest running contributing opinion writer, first pinning a piece in 1968 about how the trauma he experienced in Vietnam gave him the right to use several racist slurs, some of which he still uses today whenever he shows up unannounced for lunch. We have tried to ask him to phone ahead but his fingers are too fucked to operate a smartphone despite his constant complaints about telemarketers.
