My parents were very relieved to hear that TPR and I had overcome our differences and decided to remarry. Our divorce in the mid-1990s had been pretty low-key (he’d simply “gone off” me) and since then we had been spending more and more time together. Indeed some of our newer friends hadn’t even registered that we were actually a “divorced couple”.

The day of the wedding finally arrived. We gathered at the White House, where all was chaos and my mother feared that we would refuse to go through with the ceremony. My sister S in super-pale make-up, and surrounded by cronies who looked like they had stepped straight off the set of the Thriller video, was enough to frighten anyone off.