Donald MacInnes: 'I have to have £500 a month spare from now until at least 2035'

Donald, who is about to become a father for the first time, discovered that the total cost of raising a child is something in the region of £230,000

If you ever so gently cup a hand to your ear and listen carefully, two things are almost guaranteed to happen. First, you will look to those around you (and to any passing members of Her Majesty's Plod), like the worst kind of gurning nutjob.

Second, you may just be able to hear the tick… tock… tick… tock… of the countdown to my impending fatherhood. Actually, due to the realities of newspaper publishing, by the time this column "hits" the "streets", my lovely wife may already have been relieved of the abominable abdominal burden of our wee blessing (I say "wee"… it's looking for all the world like a nine-pounder).

Our son (for it is indeed a he) is pencilled in for a 25 April check-in, but the human body is nothing if not utterly dismissive of deadlines, so I may already be a father by the time you read this.

And if that is indeed the case, my words will always be wanting, so allow me to go to an infinitely higher source and quote Mr John Steinbeck, from his 1929 debut novel Cup of Gold: "Why do men like me want sons?" he wondered. "It must be because they hope in their poor beaten souls that these new men, who are their blood, will do the things they were not strong enough nor wise enough nor brave enough to do. It is rather like another chance at life; like a new bag of coins at a table of luck after your fortune is gone." And if my fortune is not yet gone, it is certainly at risk of imminent dissipation, given all of the anecdotal evidence about the cataclysmic impact of a new child on your cashflow.

I wrote in these pages a couple of weeks ago about the total cost of raising a child being something in the region of £230,000. That is certainly a mighty hillock of cash. And when you break it down, things don't look any rosier. Over the 20 years or so (minimum) that you will be expected to finance your darling progeny, you're looking at 11 or 12 grand a year, which is split between you and your partner if he or she is a working stiff like mine. That's about a grand a month between you, or £500 each. And I don't know about you, but rare is the month when I have the odd monkey going spare in my current account. (Point of interest: £500 being known as a monkey stems from the days of the Raj, when British soldiers noticed that a 500 rupee note featured a picture of one of those banana-fixated rascals.)

So, all I have to do is make sure I have £500 a month spare from now until at least 2035. And yes, this is an extraordinarily daunting proposition to get one's head around; but then you read again Mr Steinbeck's elegant prose, and you begin to realise that it's not really all that much. After all, what is a few quid here or there measured against a new bag of coins at a table of luck?

And with that, I bid you a temporary farewell. I'll see you on the other side, as a father. Just don't be asking me for a tenner till pay day.

Twitter.com/DonaldAMacInnes