With apologies to Mrs T – we are a grandfather! Yes, I’m happy but also feeling so very old

WE ARE a grandfather! You must excuse me for adopting Margaret Thatcher’s celebrated use of the plural pronoun when she announced the birth of her first grandchild.

At such an exciting time as this, we old crocks can’t be expected to observe all the niceties of grammar — and somehow the first person singular seems inadequate to express the joyful significance of the event.

Enough to say that in the small hours of last Saturday morning, after a long and difficult labour, our beloved daughter-inlaw was safely delivered of a fine healthy son, Rafael Thomas Utley — as archangelic as his first name suggests (his mum is half- Sicilian, which I’m told accounts for the ‘f’, in place of the ‘ph’).

I’m delighted to report that mother and baby are in excellent form, and grandparental joy is unconfined.

Besotted

As for those birth pains, it is thanks — or curses — to the miracle of modern technology that I know all about them.

Indeed, I feel the families and friends of both new parents went through all the agony and suspense of the labour ourselves — although my daughter-in-law may reasonably argue that she had the worst of it.

This was because our besotted son, the new dad, who suffered by her side through it all, had set up a WhatsApp thread entitled ‘minute-by-minute babynews’, which kept us up to date through the night with the latest developments in the maternity unit.

So it was that Rafael’s imminent arrival made me break a long-held resolution: that I would never have anything to do with social media — or antisocial media, as I prefer to think of WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter etc., in my crusty, grandfatherly way.

It has always struck me that the possibilities of saying the Wrong Thing on the internet, as even Donald Trump must surely be coming to realise, are almost infinite.

Yet if I refused to join the babynews thread, while everyone else was pouring out love and good wishes, I’d not only appear standoffish — the last thing I felt, when all my heart was with them in the labour ward — but I’d miss the news of the birth and the pictures of the newborn Utley.

But sure enough, in my lifetime first contribution to social media, I made a Trump-like fool of myself.

It came about that on Friday night, when the birth was expected at any moment, I was breaking my journey home at the Falcon, Clapham Junction, where the Sheffield United v Bristol City match was playing on a vast TV screen.

Now, I’m not much of a football fan myself, but I know a good goal when I see one. And when Jamie Patterson scored for Bristol City at the end of the first half, it was clearly a humdinger. The stranger standing next to me went into ecstasies and threw his arms around me, before apologising and explaining that he came from Bristol and so couldn’t contain his inexpressible joy.

Well, my half-Sicilian daughter-in-law also happens to be a Bristolian, born and bred. So reckoning the goal might lift her spirits, I whipped out my iPhone and wrote a message on the babynews thread, venturing that Patterson’s majestic strike for City must surely be a good omen for the birth. Big mistake!

The moment I pressed the ‘ send’ button, I had that uncomfortable feeling I’d forgotten something important. The expectant dad was quick to fill me in: the Bristolian half of his wife’s family are passionate Rovers fans. To them, as he told me later, cheering for City was like rooting for the Germans in World War II. Mea maxima culpa.

Relief

After the birth, babynews brought home to me the full horror of my blunder when our son posted what he claimed were the betting odds on the newborn’s name. The 6/1 favourite, he said, was Calogero Gasperino Utley (presumably this was an example of ‘ expectation management’, aimed at preparing elderly fuddy-duddy relations to accept the slightly unusual Rafael as a relief).

Meanwhile, the 1,000/ 1 outsider was . . . Jamie Patterson Utley.

As it happens, I needed no softening up for Rafael. I reckon it’s a great name to carry through life — and I’m touched beyond words by their choice of Thomas as his middle name. As the mere seventh generation Utley to bear it, I’m honoured to welcome Rafi as the ninth.

Which brings me to the passage of time, and the question put to me yesterday by a cynical friend in the pub (you will think I spend my life there, but I swear it’s no more than a couple of hours a day).

When I told him my news, he asked: ‘Does it make you feel happy, or does it make you feel old?’ The honest answer — and I suspect many readers will know what I mean — is both. Happy, certainly. Very happy indeed.

But there’s no getting away from it: the arrival of another generation is a vivid reminder that life won’t go on for ever, and we grandparents are entering a new and perhaps final stage on our journey from the cradle to the grave.

The good news this week is that this realisation itself is apparently a source of happiness. Or so we are led to believe by the producers of an internet app, which climbed on Wednesday into the top ten of the App Store’s paid Health and Fitness chart.

The idea behind We Croak — as the smartphone software is called, with brutal simplicity — is said to be inspired by a Bhutanese belief that contemplating death five times a day is the surest route to happiness.

With this in mind, the app’s developers set about designing a programme to give users five reminders of human mortality each day, accompanied by quotations such as Herman Melville’s: ‘ Death is only a launching into the region of the strange Untried.’

Gaffes

Others include the wise words of Margaret Attwood: ‘Sooner or later, I hate to break it to you, you’re gonna die, so how do you fill in the space between here and there? It’s yours. Seize your space.’

Hansa Bergwall, the New York publicist who conceived We Croak, explains: ‘I had been reading a lot about the Stoics, who practised memento mori [reminder of death], and beliefs around Buddhism. What appealed to me was that it sounded so actionable. [By which I think he means ‘doable’ rather than ‘sue-able’] Just think of death five times a day. I could do that.

‘But I couldn’t. I kept forgetting. The mind apparently doesn’t want to think about death, because we’re afraid of it.’

According to Mr Bergwall, the app works a treat — although to borrow a phrase from Mandy Rice-Davies, the late Christine Keeler’s model associate in the Profumo affair: ‘He would say that, wouldn’t he?’

‘Whatever it is I’m stressing about, maybe it’s work or family drama,’ he says, ‘all of a sudden it will come through and put things in perspective. Most of the time that stress doesn’t seem as big any more.’

Yes, it’s an interesting thought — and I’m prepared to believe there may be something in it. After all, I’ve often observed that religious people, who think more about death and the hereafter than most of us, seem to be generally more serene than non-believers as they near the age of the inevitable.

Mind you, given my unhappy experiences of all things internet-related — and I’m not just thinking of social media gaffes about Bristol football teams — I don’t think I’ll be trying We Croak just yet.

Anyway, who wants to think about death, when there’s new life to fill us grandparents with rejoicing?