Anticlimax. As we trudge home from the supermarket, laden down with carrier bags, I begin to relax slightly: even when my jacket got caught up on the front of a suicide grannie's shopping trolley, nobody noticed the hardware and started screaming. (This is twenty-first-century England, home of handgun hysteria: they're not being polite.) "By the way," Mo comments edgily as we wait to cross a main road, "don't you think you should be keeping your right hand free?"

I scan the surroundings for feral supernatural wildlife: "If I need my hand the shopping can take its chances."

"Then don't you think it'd be better to be carrying the bag with the bread and cheese in that hand, rather than the milk and the jar of pickled cucumbers?"

I swear quietly, try to switch hands, and get the bags inextricably entangled, just as the green man illuminates. We are a cover-free couple for the entire duration of our panicky scurry across the street crossing: "I should have held out for an attack alarm," I grumble.

"We'll sort one out on Monday," Mo says absentmindedly. "Watch the vegetables, dear."

On Sunday, we're due to have lunch with my parents, which means catching the tube halfway across London and then rattling way the hell out into suburbia on a commuter line run by a bus company distinguished for their hatred and contempt for rail travelers. I wear the holster, this time keeping my right hand free, and Mo carts her violin case along. Our trains are not ambushed by dragons, suicide bombers, or chthonian tentacle monsters. Frankly, given the quality of the postprandial conversation, this is not a net positive. Mo's face acquires much the same impassive expressiveness as an irritated Komodo dragon when Mum makes the usual fatuous (and thoughtless) comment about wishing for the patter of tiny feet. We are not, perforce, allowed to discuss our work in the presence of civilians, so we are short of conversational munitions with which to retaliate—they still think I work in computer support, and Mo's some sort of statistician. By the time we make our excuses and leave I'm thinking that maybe I'd better leave the gun behind on future parental visits.

"Did you enjoy the vegetables?" I ask the steaming vortex of silence beside me as we walk back up the street towards the railway station.

"I thought you were going to roast them at one point."

"Sorry, I'm chicken."

She sighs. "You don't need to apologize for your parents, Bob. They'll get over it eventually."

"They're not to know." I glance back over my shoulder. "We could, you know. There's still time. If you want."

"Time to fit in all the heartbreak and pain of raising wee ones so they're just old enough to appreciate the horror of it all? No thanks."