I was nearly 30. Fate decided that now I had found the right professional path, it was time to push me out of my comfort-zone elsewhere and introduced me to the man who would become my husband. We met at the book launch of a friend, whose PhD about Ireland and the shires in the Middle Ages had been published by Cambridge University Press. As he said in his welcome-and-thank-you speech, “Film rights are still available.”

For further details of the meet-uncute, please refer to the book I wrote about our courtship and eventual wedding (entitled The Reluctant Bride and subtitled One Woman’s Journey (Kicking And Screaming) Down the Aisle), but here it will suffice to say that something about the corduroy-clad, prematurely grey thirty-something historian-by-training who confessed himself furious that he had had to come out tonight to support one of his dearest friends, when he had just started a book on the Suez Crisis that he had been trying to get hold of for ages, appealed to me.

On one of our early dates I mention that my own historical knowledge is so sparse that I had read the entirety of The Wolves Of Willoughby Chase without realising that it was set in an alternative timeline, in which a King James III was on the throne. On our next date Christopher arrives with a bagful of his most accessible books regarding the history of England. I do not even understand the titles. He opens up another bag: “I didn’t want to offend you, but…” An array of Ladybird books from his childhood is spread before me. “If you read these in the order I advise,” he says, “we might get somewhere.” And so we have. (I’ve read the Hilary Mantel Cromwell trilogy now and I knew who almost all the main players were, and roughly what was going on, almost all the time. So there.)

“The key to a happy relationship? Books. These are the 3 bookish green flags to look for in a partner”