I've just finished reading an article in The Independent about the Aberfan disaster of 1966, which happened exactly 40 years ago today, and it has triggered a series of thoughts.

Greg and I walked home from school that day - I was nine, he was just approaching his seventh birthday - and entered the house by the back door. We found our mother standing at the ironing board, full of the terrible news: a school in Wales had been buried by a slag heap that had liquefied and run down a slope. Over 100 children our age had been killed. Mum was deeply upset by it, and it was a horror that affected me too. It was all too easy to imagine myself buried alive just as the children of Aberfan had been. The article mentions how Aberfan 'remains synonymous with unspeakable grief about the death of children'. It is true. This morning I only had to see the word in my RSS news reader to know instantly what the article was about and to feel a strange prickling sensation at the back of my neck.

The few surviving children are now in their forties, their parents in their seventies. I started to think about how we are shaped by our times, and how different this shaping has been for my and my parents' generations.

My boyhood was illuminated by the exploration of space, from Yuri Gagarin to the Apollo 11 moon landing, which the family all watched on TV. There was another event in 1966 in Britain that is deeply carved into male memories: England beating Germany in the World Cup final at Wembley. It was still soon enough after WWII, believe it or not, for this victory to have had deep militaristic overtones.

In the Sixties Michael Apted began his documentary series on fourteen children - seven working class, seven middle class - revisiting their lives every seven years. The 'children' are just a year older than me. Every seven years, as his documentaries are released a year after they are shot, I've aged a year and therefore the ages of his subjects are always the same as mine. I see myself there every time, suspended somewhere between the two classes of England.

In the late Seventies I was just the right age for Punk: the Sex Pistols, The Damned, The Jam, The Clash, The Stranglers, and a host of other bands that played the soundtrack to my college days - and that summer of '76!

In the Eighties I shared the excess as a frequent flyer Yuppie in Philadelphia - two sports cars, a Centre City apartment and a spectacular girlfriend.

The nineties were more introspective for me, as they were for many others - a time for reassessment, a return to values, approaching life from the inside out. I went back to University; I cut back on the travelling.

It all sounds so easy when I compare it to my parents' evolution. They were both born soon after WWI, when Europe was still trying to put itself back together again. Things were simple and hard. No telephones in working class houses then; coal to heat the water and food, the toilet at the bottom of the yard. Then came the depression. My grandfather was out of work and earned a few pennies by singing on the streets of London, his pal playing along on a piano which they dragged around on a trolley.

The League of Nations failed and Europe's march of peace was proven to be a stumble, soon to be followed by another fall into war. My father joined the RAF just months before Great Britain's declaration, and was eighteen when it all started again. He was torpedoed in the North Atlantic and saw his friend Barry fall to his death during the sinking. My mother heard that it was dad who had been killed and didn't know the truth for several weeks.

Before they had time to really get to know each other, or themselves, they had a family to look after. The move to Australia was the first of many separations to come, disruptions, leavings of homes and pets and circles of friends, changes of culture and language. They did so many things separately, I wonder if this prevented them ever doing them together? And now it is as if their two worlds are slowly pulling apart again, like the two halves of Europe, like their earlier geographical separations, like the two halves of dad's ship. Mum is already an island dropping below the horizon; dad is a peninsula, still attached by a thin shifting band of sand - his future isolation nevertheless just as certain as mum's.

We take our luck as it finds us. I feel I've been lucky. Mum and dad have not been unlucky. Despite the much tougher lives they led, how much more fortunate they are to still have their family around them - unlike the parents of Aberfan: 'Even after 40 years some people are still waiting for their children to come home.'