WHEN MY BEST friend and I realised that after many years of increasingly close companionship we had really become partners, we decided to put our companionship on a proper legal footing. Same sex couples can do this now, and there are sensible reasons for it. I don’t myself believe a piece of paper is what makes a partnership and I detest ceremony; and Julian and I decided not to make a big thing of the signing at Bakewell Town Hall, or to write columns about it. It was hardly as if this were a matter of huge public interest. We thought we might have a glass of champagne afterwards with a few friends and family, and a celebration a year after the event.

All went according to plan. There were no silver-lettered invitations, no poems or music, no (aargh) wedding list, no videos and absolutely no dancing. Two days later we drove down to Barcelona for a flight to Bogotá: we were bound for Colombia with a group of friends.

We joined the Avianca check-in queue. Phew! All done with no fuss and no prancing around.

FLYING BACK and forth in recent weeks I’ve spent many hours sitting with families I don’t know, and their small children. There are some dreadful parents, aren’t there? More than once I’ve wanted to take a confused and wailing child, talk to it calmly (instead of a wild alternation between coochy-cooing, slapping and screamed abuse) and impart some sense of order to the domestic scene. A Grumpy-Old-Man-ish complaint is (mercifully) unvoiced: “Hopeless parenting . . . condemning children to failure . . . what chance has that poor kid of growing into a normal adult?”, etc.

Quite a reasonable chance, actually. The finger-wagger within me is wrong. From dreadful upbringings and incompetent parents, normal, functioning adults do regularly emerge. From loving, dutiful parenting, adults with tremendous behavioural problems do, equally regularly, emerge. The English are on the whole (to my eye) somewhat neglectful parents, whereas the Catalan and Spanish people at my flight’s destination seem more attentive and stable with their kids.

That is not to say that a rotten childhood cannot damage human beings; but if there were anything like a simple equation between quality of parenting input and quality of offspring outcome, then we could predict. In practice we cannot. Siblings differ sharply. Good parents don’t necessarily make good children, nor bad parents bad children, and fine young women and men keep walking out of the chaos of a hopeless upbringing. Only the other day I was making a programme about Eleanor Roosevelt, one of the greatest American women of her age, whose father drank himself to death at the age of 34.

Looking for a colt with equine potential, would you concentrate your researches on whether the mare was a good mother? Maybe humans are not so different, and much that counts for good or ill is hard-wired into us at birth. Maybe the possibility parents do have is not of making but of breaking a child. Many seem to be trying. Happily they by no means always succeed.

MY OWN mother, for whose 80th birthday I was flying from Liverpool to Spain, will probably disagree, having invested much of her life in bringing up six children. When I, her eldest, was born, she gave up a career as an actress just as it was taking off. She still loves and studies Shakespeare. So for her birthday party we organised a small troupe of actors to play a few of her favourite scenes, including Titania’s awakening. Naturally she played Titania, the fairy queen.

“But I need elevation, up among the branches,” she said. So we got her Catalan son-in-law Joaquim to use his JCB digger, and filled its scoop with flowers. Mum climbed in and Quim started the machine and raised the scoop about 15ft into the air, with her in it, triumphant among the flowers: “What angel wakes me from my flowery bed?” My own suggestion, that we switch to Macbeth — “Is this a digger that I see before me?” — was turned down.

WHERE WAS I when this column started? Ah yes, in the check-in queue at Barcelona airport. Trring-trring — my mobile phone. I’d better take this last call, I thought, before escaping Europe, and attention. “Hello?” “Hello. This is the Daily Mail. And we think congratulations are in order . . .”

Times Recommends

• Resist urge to throw voters red meat
• Slay sacred cows and be candid
• We cannot let these 100 deaths deflect us