When our daughter was born, our second child, she was in a hurry. We'd entreated with the nurse on duty at the maternity ward to call our doctor; she had, but had informed him there was no hurry; he could turn back over and get in another hour's sleep. By the time he eventually arrived he was ten minutes late for the delivery. The nurse who'd assured him, trained in Britain as a midwife, had told my husband to slip on hospital greens and assist her in delivering our daughter.

When, 34 years later, I watched our granddaughter slip from her mother's womb into independent life, we'd had to impress upon nurses that birth was imminent; a gynaecologist-obstetrician who had just finished delivering her patient's baby had to be co-opted into another delivery, before our daughter's obstetrician had arrived. The memory is acute in my mind of a tiny baby with long slender fingers and toes.

She was, in fact, a tiny girl as she grew toward school-age attendance, spending every day of the working week with her grandparents. When she entered the world I was just about to enter my 60th year. And for the next decade her day-time care was in our hands.

Yesterday, as she folded me into a big hug, she smiled down at me, saying she was convinced that I kept growing smaller every time she saw me.