The year was 1985, at the height of the AIDS scare. A colleague returned from Yorkshire, where he’d been covering the miners strike.

Over a pint, he confided that he’d spent a night of passion with the landlady of the B&B he’d stayed in, like Michael Caine in Get Carter.

‘I hope it was safe sex,’ I said.

‘Oh, yes,’ he replied with a broad grin on his face. ‘She was too old to have babies.’

By ‘too old’ he meant she was in her 50s, when nature calls a halt to the child-bearing years.

I couldn’t help thinking back to this exchange when I read about a retired couple, both 72, from Britain having a baby via a surrogate mother in California.

The husband and wife, referred to only as Mr and Mrs K, have obtained a parenting order from the High Court, despite the judge warning that they both could be dead before the child, a boy referred to as B, is 18.

Mrs Justice Knowles said: ‘They have begun parenting at a time in their lives when, despite their current good health, it is foreseeable that their health will decline and that one or both of them will become seriously incapacitated or die before B reaches his majority.’

The judge said that although she was granting the order to give ‘long term permanence and security’ to the boy’s care arrangements, she was making it public for the benefit of others contemplating going down the foreign surrogacy route in future.

The wealthy couple travelled to the US where they paid £150,000 to the surrogate mother, who gave birth using the husband’s sperm and a donor egg.

Commercial surrogacy is illegal in Britain, which is why they went to California, a favoured destination for such procedures – along, increasingly, with cut-price Mexico.

Mrs Justice Knowles warned they both could be dead before the child is 18

And although the transaction was above board in America, they still couldn’t be declared the child’s legal parents here until the High Court order was granted.

Because of their age, they have nominated a couple in their early 30s to bring up the boy in the event of either of both of them dying or becoming incapacitated.

They wanted another child after losing a son, aged 26, to cancer in 2020. That’s perfectly understandable. But there’s a world of difference, when you hit your 70s, between having a grown man around and a young child.

OK, so they can afford expensive nannies and have made provision in their will for a younger couple to take care of their son if and when they die. And, yes, plenty of wealthy older men father children in their later years. But these are normally with much younger second, third, or even fourth wives, keen on kids as an insurance policy.

For the record, I’m instinctively in favour of individual freedom and fully understand this couple’s motives. Yet there’s good reason why paying someone to have a baby in Britain is against the law, especially when so many young couples trying to adopt are put through the most tortuous bureaucratic hoops.

Like it or not, there is also good reason why Mother Nature decides that women of a certain age shouldn’t be having babies after the menopause.

This case, too, has a particular resonance with me, since I am going to be 72 next birthday, the same age as a Mr and Mrs K. Admittedly, we were lucky enough to have children in our 20s, but I certainly wouldn’t want to be going through fatherhood again.

When you get to my age, it’s bad enough having to get up in the middle of the night, every night, to answer the call of nature, let alone change a nappy.

(Not that I ever did, according to Mrs Littlejohn. But that’s beside the point.)

What also troubles me is that everyone seems to be looking at this case from the perspective of Mr and Mrs K – and not the child himself.

It’s all about their ‘rights’. What about the rights of a young boy to have a fit dad in his prime to play football with, for instance? Or look forward to going to the pub with when he’s 18? By the time he reaches 18, his old man may be long dead.

And if the worst should happen – no, when the inevitable happens – how will he feel when he learns his parents had made arrangements to pass him on to another couple like a second-hand car?

Sorry if this upsets some people, but buying a baby in your 70s from a stranger in California, even if the father is the sperm donor, strikes me as selfish in the extreme.

Sometimes you just have to accept that you’re too old to have babies.