Monopoly money, a sudden gust of wind scattering it off the board and across the room. Someone has opened the sliding door. How careless! A breeze rushes in and picks up the world's lightest bank notes. There they go, like little anxious birds fluttering in the air, the same thing happening in houses and rooms all across New Zealand, in the lazy family days of summer, in lockdown – sometimes this happens by accident, sometimes by design.
Monopoly money is so flimsy. The black and white $1 notes, the yellow $20 notes, the deep orange $500 notes … all of it weightless, all of it worthless. But the fight for it is real. The root of all evil is the want of Monopoly money. All games tell us something about ourselves and the families we inhabit, but only one game makes such a virtue of naked, grasping, horrible, and downright mean self-interest – I'm a bad loser, given to really bitter and abusive tirades.
Monopoly money, in its tidy little stacks in front of each player. It's an equal playing field at the start of every game. The light of socialism gleams an instant. And then it's pure capitalism, free enterprise at its worst, the ideals of Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand from corner to corner, the cause of terrible fights, stoking the slow and enduring fires of resentment, creating an underclass who have every right to despise the good fortunes of others, dividing and damaging families, setting, for example, father against daughter – all I can ever hope for is that someone will open the sliding door and disrupt or end the game.
Monopoly money is good to have but the best thing to have is property. We all have our favourites on the board. I love the railways. The satisfaction of correctly pronouncing Marylebone, its four syllables sounding like a musical phrase. I also love the modesty and charm of Old Kent Road and Whitechapel. Gonna take my horse down the Old Kent Road, gonna ride 'til I can't no more because Old Kent Road and Whitechapel are such cheap properties that they barely bring in any rent and constitute a waste of money and may be a contributing factor in the fact that I always, always lose - the horse is useless.
Monopoly money, added up, only amounts to $20,850. It feels like the bank holds so much more than that. It feels like the winning player holds so much more than that. You look at our own few pathetic notes and then you look across the board at their massive stash and it looks like a million dollars, give or take - it looks like all the money in the world - and there you are, charging six lousy bucks in rent when they land on Whitechapel. It's no fun to lose at any game but only one game punishes you with insolvency. How did you spend your lockdown? I spent mine crushed by market forces and a 14-year-old.
