We have reached an age where very few of our friends still have two living parents. I’m talking here about friends of our own age, people we were at school or college with, people born in the 1960s. We have younger friends, born in the 1970s, who became parents at the same time that my wife and I did, or even earlier. Unsurprisingly, a greater proportion of them still have two living parents.

Counting through the families like mine and my wife’s, where the parents married and had their first children in the 1950s, and had other children in the 1960s, I can’t think of any where the mother and father are still alive. I hear occasionally about people my own age who had at least one parent make it past 95, even to 100, but none of those parents are still with us. The oldest of them did not survive Covid.

This all means that none of my children’s friends and contemporaries that we know about still have four living grandparents. Statistically there are bound to be some, for children whose mothers and fathers were born from the 1970s onwards, but we don’t know any.

I still had three living grandparents when I was born, but they all died before I turned 16. I only spent any significant time with one of them, my father’s mother, a few days in Kilkenny when I was six. My mother was only seven when her mother died, and her father remarried within 18 months. She didn’t see much of him after that. She was brought up by a maiden aunt in Dublin and came to London as a teenager. Her father visited London occasionally in the 1960s. I only know that for sure because we have photos of him in our back garden, and with me and my brother in Trafalgar Square. For some reason I have no memories of that trip.

I did spend an evening with him when I was 14. We were on our last holiday to Ireland as a family of five. Although we all returned to my parents’ homeland many times after that, there were never more than four of us in the country at the same time. On that last visit, when I was 14, we visited my mother’s father and his second wife, the only time I can remember doing so. She (my mother’s stepmother) looked very ill. She was very ill. She died in the night. My mother returned the next day to see her father but I did not. Within 18 months he was dead too. For most of my life there has been a distinct lack of grandparents.