When I was a father the first time around, I was a working man Now I’ve got all the time in the world. Pauline goes out and I say, ‘I’m mother today.’ I like being with Amy, playing, and being out walking.”I know there’s a lot of flak over pensioner fathers They say we won’t understand our teenage children. Well, if I’m lucky enough to live that long, I’ll try to keep up-to-date My grandchildren are already making sure of that. I knew what all the fuss was about when Take That split up, and I can recognise the difference between Blur and Oasis – although I’m not sure who’s the best.”Ray, 66, and Wendy, 39Ray Davies and Wendy Lewis have two small boys, Tomas, two, and Carwyn, one. Ray, a county councillor in Caerphilly, has four children from his first marriage, aged 42, 40, 24 and 22.

Wendy is an artist in residence at the Royal Gwent Hospital in Newport, Wales.They met in 1989, at rehearsals of the Cardiff Red Choir – Cor Cochion Caer Dydd – a group founded to raise money for socialist causes It was an unlikely match. He was a “valley boy”, a former steelworker and magistrate turned political activist. The thing that struck me was all the new technology they have these days Pauline had to have an emergency Caesarean They rushed me into the theatre, dressed in all the gear. That was exciting.”He says that his other children still mean as much to him as Amy, and that they have totally accepted their young half-sister: they visit and buy her presents: “When two parents divorce, I think it hurts the children, no matter if they are grown up or not. I don’t suppose, if I’d still been with my first wife, I would have considered having more children But I thought: I could kick the bucket any time now. Pauline is still young, and there’s no need for her to be on her own She may meet someone else.

But when I died, I wanted her to have something of me.”On Christmas Day the same year, she told me she was one month pregnant I felt great. Not that I saw it as any achievement, but the pure fact that there was a baby there. I’d been present at Ellen’s birth, and I wanted to be there at Amy’s. They married in 1980 and live in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire.”I’ve known Pauline since she was a teenager,” he says. “She was a school friend of my daughter Ellen, and was only 14 or 15 when we first met; obviously, I didn’t have any romantic notions then. But she got a full-time job on the stall, and we were going to warehouses together The relationship just developed. She moved in 18 months before we married.”She has friends of her own generation.