Even the least sympathetic observer would spare a thought this week for William, Prince of Wales. His wife Catherine, with whom he shares three young children, is still recovering from a major abdominal operation. (We don’t know the details, but 14 days in hospital means “major” in anyone’s book.) Now his father, who happens to be the King, is undergoing treatment for cancer.

The Royal Family, it is always said, offers us a mirror of our own families. If your family is anything like mine, the run of Windsor health scares offers one more way that royal lives tend not to echo our own family’s experiences directly, but to rhyme gently with them. We may not live in palaces nor maintain our own “medical household”, but within families health crises are like buses: they do have a habit of all coming along at once.

Part of this is down to classic generational patterns. A group of siblings will reach old age together; serious health conditions can reveal themselves in children just as their parents are feeling the first pang of middle age.

In The Bee Sting, Paul Murray’s widely acclaimed novel which was nominated for last year’s Booker Prize, one character finds herself listening to a group of friends warning her about turning 40. “Your body turns into cellulite You start getting aches and pains everywhere You keep thinking you have cancer Your parents get old… Then they get sick Then they die.” The passage is part of a section of the book written without punctuation, which adds to the relentless sense of portending doom.

Many of my friends are approaching 40; the literary types among them like to cite this passage as painfully apt. Some have had........

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