Neil Mackay reflects on his own painful experience of how easily families fall apart, and why sometimes blood is not thicker than water and leaving is better than staying, following Brooklyn Beckham's statement about his parents.

Even Sara Cox was at it. Lovely Sara Cox, the nation’s big sister, giggling on her Radio Two show at Brooklyn Beckham and the emotional bomb site that’s his family.

Newspapers, TV channels, radio stations. They all found it funny. Perhaps the joke was somehow in the fact that the pain is being suffered by the super-rich and their children. Is that it? Schadenfreude?

Though millions of folk, I suspect, didn’t find the story of Beckham’s irreconcilable split with his family funny at all. I certainly didn’t.

Not because I’m some po-faced puritan, or because I put the rich and famous on a pedestal - far from it, I assure you. I’ve no envy of the Instagram class. But because I empathise with him.

I’ve been through much the same myself - as have men and women all across this land.

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Family estrangement isn’t uncommon. Indeed, sadly, it’s very common. There’s few I know who haven’t felt the wound of a rift which cannot be mended with a parent or sibling.

My own experience of family estrangement is uncomfortably close to that of Beckham.

There’s differences, variations on similar themes - a swapping in some places of characters, roles, events and motives - but broadly, and without going into detail for reasons I hope you can appreciate, I know what he’s experiencing.

It sounds as if Beckham had a troubled........

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