Becoming a father late in life is the surest way of showing a man that — just as he was beginning to fear that all he faced was the prospect of winding down into a sleepy retirement — the arrival of a healthy baby means that, instead, he can now relive all those joys of fatherhood. In particular he can relive the white-knuckle excitement of being poor for at least 25 more years as he scrabbles to find ways to pay for a further generation’s worth of nappies, nannies, school blazers and iPods.

Yesterday, the Belfast-born singer Van Morrison became a father again at the age of 64 (see page 4); this time to George Ivan Morrison III. He joins other sixtysomething fathers, such as Picasso and Pavarotti; Paul McCartney and Rod Stewart; Warren Beatty and Cary Grant. Charlie Chaplin had a child at 73; Saul Bellow at 84.

Late fatherhood often remains a source of amusement, or of bemusement, to many. Yet it carries many unexpected rewards. These include:

1. You are by now too world-weary and short of energy to set your new child a truly bad example;

2. You have enough free time to help with his maths homework; even if it comes back with a note from teacher saying: “Right answer, but please tell your dad we don’t do cosines this way anymore. Nowadays we use a calculator”;

3. The guys at the pensioners’ club show new respect. Siring a baby in your sixties is the virility equivalent of boasting a very low golf handicap;

4. You can save time, and have fun bamboozling government officials, by collecting your pension and your child benefit simultaneously;

5. By the time your new baby is a teenager, you will still, of course, be a huge embarrassment to him; but by now you’ll be way too old to care.