Toby Young Toby Young

Status Anxiety: Going for a fifth?

Toby Young suffers from Status Anxiety

issue 23 April 2011

I came in late the other night to discover my wife watching One Born Every Minute, a Channel 4 programme featuring women having babies. I sat down next to her on the sofa and it wasn’t long before my hands were clamped over my eyes. A young woman was howling in pain as her insides were twisted into a pretzel, with all manner of unspeakable muck seeping out on to the bedsheets. As her ordeal came to an end, after hour upon hour of screaming agony, the hospital room looked like a butcher’s shop that had been blown up with a cluster bomb.

‘They should show this to 14-year-old girls,’ I said to Caroline. ‘It’s the most effective form of birth control I’ve ever seen.’

She shot me a guilty look.

‘Darling?’ she said. ‘How would you feel about having another baby?’

Now, before you jump to the wrong conclusion, let me make it clear that Caroline isn’t pregnant.

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