Sometimes they seemed to remember the old love, and realise that is was still there, unchanged and as strong as ever. And sometimes they forgot.

When they are babies you can revel in them, you can kiss their cheek as hard as you dare and get drunk on their smell and the velveteen sheen of their skin. When your children are babies, you can get stoned on the incredible living fact of them. That all changes as they grow. You hold them. And one day you realise you have stopped holding them.

I realised by the time they are in their teens, you can let years drift by without really touching them. The physical expression of your love – the hugs, the kisses, the way you are allowed to touch their hair – all disappears. When Rufus and I came into shy, fleeting contact now – the hurried hug, the awkward kiss, those gestures of habit more than feeling – it was like an electric shock from the button of a lift, and we immediately recoiled with an alarm.

It’s hard to be the parent who always says no. it’s hard to be the one who always spoils the fun, who always urges caution, who always tries to keep their family out of the emergency ward and the police cells and the mortuary. But that’s the role that you seem to have forced upon me lately. I never wanted that role. You lot made me take it.

There comes a moment when you don’t recognise them. At the start, you have all this unconditional love. It’s as if you never knew you had that kind of love inside you that you were capable of feeling that strongly, that deeply. That much love. But then it changes, it changes almost without you noticing that it’s changed. Suddenly it feels like the connection to the past has been broken. It’s as brutal as that. As final as that. You just don’t recognise them any more. It’s as if they are a different person – I mean, quite literally, someone else. And that’s the big problem. How do you keep loving someone when they are no longer the same person? It’s not that you don’t love them. It’s worse than that. You don’t even know them.

Because there are times in your life when the possibility that you could ever get hurt simply does not cross your mind. Fleeting moments of freedom when you just feel immortal. When you know that nothing in this world can touch you. That, I thought, is the very best thing about being.

Starting Over by Tony Parsons