Our first granddaughter arrived at 3.17 in the morning.

Like most grandparents, we immediately wanted to buy her something.

There were plenty of suggestions, but we kept coming back to the same problem: what do you buy a baby that might still mean something when she’s thirty?

We discovered First Dawn through De Vere Diamonds.

The idea of choosing a natural diamond for her at the beginning of her life, without deciding how she must eventually wear it, appealed to both of us.

So we selected the diamond and left it unset.

When she’s older, it can become whatever she wants it to become. A pendant, a ring, perhaps part of something we can’t even imagine today.

Then we were shown the Legacy Vault.

That was when it became emotional.

We’re very conscious of the age difference between grandparents and grandchildren. We hope we’ll be around for a very long time, but there are no guarantees.

So we both recorded messages for her.

We told her about the day she was born. We told her what her father was like when he was a little boy. We put photographs of the family into the Vault and wrote about people whose names might otherwise mean very little to her one day.

The diamond suddenly represented something much bigger.

If she chooses to have it set on her eighteenth birthday, we hope we’ll be standing beside her.

But if we’re not, she’ll still hear our voices telling her why we chose it.

That’s worth more to us than the diamond itself.