Just days before his great revelation, TPR and I had been smugly working our way through albums of old photographs, congratulating ourselves on our long and happy marriage. Now we had returned to our old house in Birmingham (the rooms bigger than we remembered) to meet his family, and for him to confess that he was leaving me.

While I sorted out old bits of string into a neat skein, he was preparing the wording of his announcement. His new girlfriend (blonde, in her 30s) and her three kids were also milling around. ‘That woman might take my husband’, I thought but ‘No way on this earth will I allow her to force me out of my Edinburgh flat’.