My dissertation was due for submission in a matter of weeks and I hadn’t started it even though I had all the access to resources that I would ever need, now that I lived in a cubby hole in the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford.

Meanwhile TPR was on the verge of making it official that he was leaving me. I tried every trick in the book to keep him. I even led him naked round a pork factory. This wasn’t as outrageous as might be assumed: we were invisible, so long as we didn’t pick up the free samples of meat on offer to the general public.

I was convinced that TPR was simply depressed – the small bottle of whisky that he carried around with him was my evidence of this. Fortunately he cheered up when presented with the challenge of cooking sausages, including specialité de la région black boudin, for my French family.