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Sunday 27 May 2012

Old father time

Becoming a dad past retirement age isn’t miraculous, it’s just selfish

He isn’t the first and he won’t be the last. But lack of originality was clearly the least of Donald Trelford’s concerns as he commandeered acres of Sunday newsprint to boast of the arrival of his baby son, Ben. Mr Trelford is, if you please, a strapping 73 years of age and joins a motley club including Des O’Connor (a father at 72), Luciano Pavarotti (67), Clint Eastwood (67), Rupert Murdoch (72), Rod Stewart (66 — his eighth) with no shortage, I fear, to follow.

Most of them, if pushed, will put up a stout defence to justify their little miracles, and while few are blessed with Trelford’s fluency, the gist is always much the same. In his case, he says, he got his defence in early to thwart inevitable attacks, ‘mainly by female columnists’ — although if he really thought pre-emption would keep us at bay, he didn’t serve a long enough apprenticeship in print.

Thus we are assured of a hands-on fatherhood, in which — imagine! — dad manages the bottles, burps and nappies that quite passed him by with his previous, now-adult children. Getting up in the night is hardly a problem, given that older people need less sleep and ‘usually make one or two nocturnal loo trips anyway’ (prostate joke, geddit?), while even if boy Ben is ‘not to have a very long relationship with his father’, quality beats quantity. Ben will have his full attention and that is ‘what matters in a relationship’. All in all, we can scarcely wait for Ben to be old enough to express the gratitude he must so surely feel.

The back-story is equally predictable. More divorce invites more additional marriages, and older men who have achieved wealth, power or influence stand a better than average chance of attracting younger women — not, to be fair to the broads, because they are necessarily gold-diggers but because successful men are frequently graced by charisma. Trelford, a former editor of the Observer, is something of a looker and a charmer which makes a wife 25 years his junior not a surprise. The usual next step in these unions seems also to have been followed here: the younger wife, still possessed of itchy ova, determines to exercise her ‘right’ to have a child, while the old fella gives in — well, to what? her desire? his vanity? — and seizes the opportunity to prove there’s still lead in his pencil.

More articles from: Carol Sarler | this section

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