Myrtle, my partner in life, has a life largely of her own. A large-boned lady of healthy appetites, she lunches sparingly in good causes and plays bridge for her metropolitan borough. She took it up in her thirties, after having children, discerning in the pastime an outlet for her formidable memory and jugular instincts. Myrtle can remember the seating plan at every chickenschnitzel wedding we have attended, the Order of Service at Her Majesty’s Coronation, the universal symbols of the periodic table and the entire line-up of the Hungarian football team that inflicted England’s first home defeat, 3–6, in the aforementioned Coronation Year, which was also the year of our marriage. Many’s the time I have urged her to apply her remarkable mental powers to a worthier object than a pack of cards. But Myrtle’s tolerance for ladies who lunch on behalf of the starving and homeless is limited.

Our two sons have grown up and apart from us, triumphs of private schooling and canny marriages. One is a Kensington obstetrician with a trophy wife, the other a libel lawyer with a traditional spouse. Over dinner, I prefer the barrister’s scurrilous gossip to the manicured sanctimony of a society abortionist. But I feel no satisfying patrimony when, on Friday nights, we play a charade of happy families around a table groaning with murderously poly-saturated fats. Monastically picking at my wife’s heedlessly prepared dietary dynamite, I retire dyspeptically to bed with a glass of camomile tea and the Spectator, a lifelong habit, while coffee is taken in the lounge. My apologies are accepted with a wince of scepticism. Some in the family, I suspect, ascribe my medical condition to chronic hypochondria.

A decent Omm-trance is pretty much unattainable on a train that starts and lurches through a thicket of signals, then spurts past outer suburbs like a runaway horse. Once the speed settles to a steady rocking, incomprehensible announcements splutter forth about the whereabouts of the refreshment car and would the chief steward please make his way to first class, thank you.