“You plant trees under which you may never sit.”

I came across this sentence earlier in the week. I have lost the source, which is careless of me, but it has not left me alone since. It is the kind of sentence that seems self-evident until it lands personally, at which point it becomes something else entirely.

My wife was not, in the event, the ideal audience for what happened next. I was looking at a photo of Evander, the youngest grandson, still on the right side of his first birthday, and I announced that by the time he reaches legal drinking age in this country, I would be over ninety – and probably no longer available to mix him his first Adonis (my current cocktail of choice; my wife regards it with the composed scepticism she reserves for most of my enthusiasms).

She regarded this announcement with rather more than that.

But here we are. Enough Said has always been the place where I say what I want.

The arithmetic is simple enough. The implication is less comfortable to sit with. Or, perhaps more accurately, it is entirely comfortable until you start doing the sums, and then it isn’t. Evander will grow up. He will, I hope, become a young man of taste and judgement. There will be a first drink, and a second. I will have been there at the beginning, making faces at him across a room, and then at some point I won’t be.

The trees get planted. Someone else sits in the shade.

This week has made all of this feel less abstract. A death, much faster than expected, unwelcome, untimely in the way that the deaths of people we love always seem untimely regardless of age. My ex-sister-in-law, a very much loved friend, aunt to my children, maker of flapjacks. I won’t say more, except that these are the moments when the arithmetic becomes real and the sentences you read in the week seem less like philosophy and more like instruction.

Plant the trees. Make the Adonis. Mean it.