‘Here you go, dear.’ Marjorie handed her an elegant china mug with a portrait of the Queen on it and sat down on the sofa next to her husband. Sylvia flipped open her notepad, fished a pen out of her bag and smiled at the two of them. Fifty years together and they looked like they were made that way. Like owners and their dogs, she thought, an unwelcome image of Jim’s mother and her Jack Russell popping into her mind; after a while, they begin to resemble each other.

‘So, how did you two meet?’

After so many months of writing the ‘golden oldies’ weekly feature, she had a good idea how the conversation would go. She knew what kept couples together for half a century – not blind devotion, not butterflies in the stomach, but compromise, patience, humour and a stoic tolerance of even the most unlovable of little habits – but something always cropped up that surprised her. There’d been the couple who’d recreated their first date on the same day every year for the past fifty; the man who said he once joked he’d only marry a left-handed woman – and then met his left-handed wife-to-be the very next day; and the 89-year-old who told her the key to not arguing was to stuff your mouth with marshmallows so you physically couldn’t speak. Sylvia had already decided to present Jim with a bag of marshmallows on their wedding day, just to kick things off in the right direction.

However, although she didn’t dislike writing the feature, it wasn’t exactly why she became a journalist. It wasn’t why she’d suffered through tutorials with Dirty Dan, Oxford’s lecherous lecturer, or why she’d turned a blind eye to her student paper’s ‘prettiest undergraduate’ competitions so that the editor, a belligerent third year from Eton, wouldn’t refuse to publish her work.

Give it time, she’d told herself, when she started interviewing the wrinklies. Give it more time, Jim had said a few months down the line, when the political magazine he worked for gave him his first cover feature and she was still drinking tea with Marjories. Fucking bad luck, Max said when her feature ideas got rebuffed by Roger again and again.

After more than eighteen months in her role as junior features writer, Roger was yet to commission a story she’d pitched. It might have begun to make her think she wasn’t good enough. But she had a first from Oxford and a portfolio of student writing that had won her a place on a graduate trainee scheme with a female acceptance rate of just 5 per cent. No, she knew she was good enough. The problem was something else – and she knew exactly what.