So it doesn’t have to be complete collapse and decay of everything

So it doesn’t have to be complete collapse and decay of everything. But I will not be playing football with him with the same abandon as if I was in my thirties.”I don’t worry about dying while he’s still young, but it makes me more aware of the need to establish a really good, deep, contented, peaceable, loving relationship with him right away. Eighty now probably equates to about 65 before, and I hope I shall still be working then. My friend and colleague Charles Wheeler is 82 and he turned out one of the best reports on BBC television news that other day that I’ve ever seen. I’m not a huge enthusiast of the thought that if and when he goes to university I shall be 80 But 80 isn’t what it was when I was growing up. Everybody I knew had children and it was just what everybody did Now I realise the uniqueness of the whole thing.

It’s a wonderful, but absolutely exhausting experience.”I now know what’s what: how precious human life is. My wife said to me this morning: ‘I can see your father and mother in him.’ My father has been dead for 25 years and my mother for 23, and so the thought that I might see them in my child is a wonderful, wonderful thing.”I can now give him a more rounded person, less spiky, less upset by trivia, much calmer and more understanding of the nature of human beings and love for each other.”There are lots of disadvantages about being 61 and some carry over into fatherhood. But I’m 49 now and something extraordinary might happen.” Family structures, it seems, replicate themselves. After all, the best preparation for being an old dad is to have had one.John Simpson: ‘When my son goes to university, I shall be 80′John Simpson, the BBC’s World Affairs Editor, became a father again at the age of 61 last week. The boy, who has yet to be named, is a year younger than his youngest grandchild. Mr Simpson has two daughters in their thirties from his first marriage His wife, Dee, is 19 years his junior.”It’s lovely. I appreciate it much, much more now than when I did when I was in my twenties and my first two children were born.

It was difficult for me having one and I wouldn’t want to repeat that. I find as a result I have to be in a relationship with a strong man.”At the same time, I do feel a kind of invisible pressure to have children in time for my father to be able to enjoy being a grandfather.”Roderick feels another kind of pressure “I always thought I didn’t want to be an older father. Approximately 20 birth disorders, including Down’s syndrome, are associated with older fathers.Some older fathers worry the flesh is weak. “What if I can’t run as fast as he wants me to be able to run?” says Michael, now 57.

Jeremy, 43 is so concerned about this that he says if he has not had his first child by the time he is 50, he will not have any.But Jack O’Sullivan, co-founder of Fathers Direct, the online advice site, says: “It doesn’t matter; he can just give his son a cuddle instead.”Gabrielle, 32, whose father is 86, says: “He is a very interesting man and a former colonel. In 2001, Professor Dolores Malaspina, of Columbia University, said she could prove there is a male biological clock after a study indicated that children born to men over 50 are three times as likely to have schizophrenia. Having a child in my fifties has been an overwhelmingly wonderful thing. Still, under the surface, you think, ‘Is what I’m doing quite natural’?”Mothers are warned that giving birth later in life means their children risk adverse health effects But older fathers have been getting a rap too. “Often men in my situation might not particularly want a baby, especially if they’ve already had children,” he says. “But they wouldn’t want to impose a childless relationship on their new wife, who might be in her thirties.