Then this new terror began, a fresh zeal jerking into life in fits and starts, hijacking the name of Allah. It’s gradually hitting its stride now, mouthing fire and destruction on the Internet, trailing a metal stick across the railings and wakening up all the pale thugs on the other side. Yoo-hoo. We hear on the news now and then that the country is on high alert in expectation of an attack, even while our own thoughts slip quietly back to work and what’s for dinner. Sometimes when I walk down Oxford Street I wonder to myself what it would be like if someone opened fire, which object I might choose to crouch behind.

Twenty years ago, leaving Belfast for London felt like saying goodbye to a mesmerising nutcase and going to live with someone calmer who knew how to hold down a job and keep her flat clean. London relaxed me: you could float at ease in its great mix of people, its cooling civility. Now I’m not so sure. Sanity is drawing down the blinds, mania is on the march.

What does the new terror want from us? More than a broad green slice of land, soaked in rainwater and bitter longing. It wants everything, so much it can’t even explain. More than anything, it wants the pleasure of watching the rest of us in fear and flailing confusion, ripping up the best of ourselves.

I have something else to worry about now besides myself: a family, the nuclear proliferation of anxieties. People talk about love in quantities. ‘How much do you love her?’ they ask, as though it is always the same product in differently sized containers. They never talk about its shapes and distillations, selfish or self-sacrificing, all the wily forms in which it can present itself.

This family slowly grew on me. Over time it has rooted and pinned me in place, thick ivy round a wooden post. Now I couldn’t extricate myself from it without snapping. If I think about it too much, sometimes, I get breathless, as if it is a weight pressing on my chest.

There’s Eve, of course, the first to tighten her hand around mine. She’s older now, calmer too, still slim but somehow stiffer and more solid than she was. We bicker about the bureaucracy of our existence, who forgot to pay the phone bill or used up the last of the milk. We don’t argue about the big things. We know we are lucky first to have found each other, and then to have had the sense to stay together.