I don’t know why my wife and I have been so lucky. I have no clue how many cosmic accidents were required to gift us three happy kids – what infinite twists of DNA, what incalculable adaptive extensions of that long chain of life with its origin in the dust of comets’ tails.

The odds against the existence of our three children were literally astronomical. The sun had to condense out of gas and spawn a string of planets, and ours had to cool to this ideal temperature where the water doesn’t boil unless you make a deliberate effort and add a spoonful of Kenco. Single cell organisms had to evolve into bicellular organisms and eventually into creatures with the impressive number of cells we humans have – I’m no biologist, but I believe it may be as many as a dozen.

And finally – and most improbably of all – each successive generation of humans had to dodge life’s ubiquitous malaises, wars and high-cholesterol foodstuffs for long enough to reproduce. Which means that somewhere along the line, Victorians had to have sex with one another.

Looking back at the ancient photos of the family on my parent’s side, as we did with the kids just recently, this seems the most unlikely conjunction of all. Not only were our children’s great-great-great-grandparents crusted in a thick layer of starch and moustache wax, dressed in rigid clothing that could never be removed, and supplied without genitals by the same northern factory that forged all Victorians from an immutable alloy of iron and spine, but our particular Victorian forbears were startlingly, mirror-splinteringly ugly.

There is no nice way to put this, so I’m going to put it the way our three-year-old did when we showed him the old sepia-toned marriage photo of two of his ancestors, their mouths frozen in that downturned line favoured by humans in those times, and by halibut in ours. “Don’t they look nice?” we said. “Oh no,” said our three-year-old matter-of-factly, “their faces is like doing a sick in my nose.”

The idea of those ancestors reproducing is as touching as they were, frankly, untouchable. For our kids’ sake, I’m so grateful that they did. They really took one for the team. My own parents are good-looking people – the hereditary hideousness has passed over them, although the grim Victorian lines of it still find some echoes in my own radio-friendly countenance.

The miracle, happily, is that my own kids are the most beautiful children in the world. Of course every parent believes this about their own kids, but I happen to be the one who is correct. The reason my kids’ faces are not like doing a sick in your nose is very simple, and I’m married to it. My wife is pretty, and looking back through the family photos on her side explains why.

The big clue about her ancestors’ photos is that they are not photos at all. They are painted portraits – not all of them commissioned. My wife’s ancestors were the sort of people painters volunteered to look at. There were serious discussions recently concerning whether a striking portrait of her twice-great grandmother should be removed from my wife’s mother’s wall and hung in the Musée D’Orsay.

On our last visit our six-year-old was captivated by that painting. He stood looking at it for ages – or for as long as a small boy is capable of standing still, which is four seconds. We asked him what he liked. He said: “How did they know what my sister will look like when she’s older?” – a question so profound that to preserve the balance of nature he had to cancel out the effect immediately by running into the kitchen and making farting noises. We stayed and looked up at the painting, and sure enough that 19th Century phantom was looking back at us with our own daughter’s eyes.

Author’s note: The photo that accompanies this article is of my paternal great grandfather’s great Aunt, real name Mary Perrings but known as Auntie Poll. She was the daughter of Jonathan Perrings of London, a stone carver, who assisted in carving the lions on Menai Bridge. The lions are 25 feet long and weigh 80 tons each.

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