Breaking News: Don’t worry, Prince William – life begins at 50….Read More

As the Prince of Wales glumly stated this week, fun can be in short supply in your 40s – but the parenting slog doesn’t last foreve

At about two o’clock in the wee small hours of Christmas morning I will be offering a heartfelt prayer of joy and thanksgiving.

Thank you, Lord, I will be saying; that I’m not at this moment trying to build a wooden fairytale castle using instructions in the original gibberish. Or perhaps a dolls house that appears to have several pieces missing.

As an added bonus, my wife is not looking at me with obvious disappointment and contempt as I complain bitterly that we should have attempted this about a week ago.

My three daughters are all now over 18, so all that pre-festive tension is a thing of the past. The fun has at last returned to parenting.

I mention this in the hope of comforting the Prince of Wales, who seems a bit down. Earlier this week he visited military families in Wiltshire and fell into conversation with young Dylan Potter, aged 14, who wanted to know what princes do for fun.

The Prince’s reply was very depressing indeed, yet only too familiar to parents of a certain age. I’m over 40, he reportedly told the youngster, glumly, adding that, at that age, fun is hard to come by.

William, who is 42, is caught in the classic midlife trap. Not only does he have three young children, but his father and stepmother have reached the age – the King is 76 – when they start to become a bit of a worry. With his wife and father both struggling with their health, this year has been particularly tough.

Cheer up, though, William, because I bring glad tidings. The grinding, back-breaking, car seat cursing, pram kicking, no fun stage of being a parent will soon pass. Well, soonish.

Suddenly, your children will eat broccoli and even sprouts without so much as a murmur. One day you will realise that you don’t have to read two chapters of Malory Towers every night. Perhaps more to the point, your children will be able to stand on balconies in the freezing cold at public events without pulling faces.

In short, you’ll discover that life begins again at about 50.

My youngest daughter is 18, and we do a lot of fun stuff together. For example, we watch football when her busy social life and work schedule allows.

We mostly stand on the terraces at Salisbury FC, who play in the National League South after promotion last season. But she’s also taken me to see Arsenal Women, and – as a birthday treat – paid for us both to watch QPR against Sheffield Wednesday at Loftus Road.

QPR were awful. They got thumped and we were right next to the Wednesday fans who very kindly sang at the tops of their voices for 90 minutes plus added time. But it’s the thought that counts.

We have also bonded over music. Rather unexpectedly, she’s taught me more than I have taught her. When she was 12, her favourite bands were Abba and Queen. If I were into music of the same vintage when I was her age, I’d have been listening to Noel Coward, Irving Berlin, and Al Jolson’s Sonny Boy.

Thanks to Spotify, she has a very wide-ranging knowledge of music. Coming back from school one evening, she was listening to ELO’s Mr Blue Sky, which first came out in 1977, “How on earth did you come across this?” I wondered.

The temperature in the car fell a good 10 degrees. “It’s a very famous song,” she said, in the withering tone of which teenage girls are the unequalled world leaders.

When her sisters come home, we play board games together, we sing together, and walk in the Wiltshire countryside. The undoubted slog of early parenting is now a distant memory.

Don’t just take my word for it. The Atlantic magazine came to pretty much the same conclusion in 2014 in a widely-shared article by Jonathan Rauch, who later wrote a book called The Happiness Curse: Why Life Gets Better After 50.

The author quoted a wise friend who said: “Midlife crisis begins sometime in your 40s, when you look at life and think: Is this all? And it ends about 10 years later, when you look at life and think: Actually, this is pretty good.”

As William waits for this remarkable transformation, he can perhaps take comfort in sibling schadenfreude, knowing that Prince Harry’s children are even younger.

Archie is five, and Lilibet is three. So Harry still has many more years of exhausted Christmas mornings ahead of him, trying to keep his eyes open as he struggles to assemble scale models of, say, Windsor Castle. Good luck with that, Harry.