My consciousness/hackles raised, I began to notice how ridiculously often we are required to supply our marital status to people. I can just about see why, for all sorts of legal reasons (which probably themselves don’t stand up to scrutiny, but that’s a rabbit hole to disappear down), it might be necessary on medical forms, but anything beyond that? No. I once tried to buy an oven and the computer wouldn’t move on unless I ticked the Miss or Mrs box.

Why? Did it not think singletons were worthy of quality white goods? Did it want to make sure I was only going to be making meals for my husband after his hard day’s work? Or did it think I was planning to have sex with the oven and didn’t want to facilitate adultery?

We may never know.

What rankles most with me is having to define myself as husbanded or not in order to buy train tickets. I’m constrained enough by your parsimonious seat allowance, thank you. So by the time it was my turn to take a trip up the aisle, I was ready to cling for dear life to my surname and anything else that would help me maintain the identity I had forged over the 30-odd years before a bloke with whom I could just about bear to share a duvet and TV remote with had entered my life, flat and vagina (in roughly that order).

“Why it’s time to recognise the feminist power of ‘Ms’”