Well, if Jools Oliver’s doing it, then it’s game over for the rest of us, isn’t it? Perfect home, perfect children, £150m in the bank, still looks like the model she was before she started popping out offspring, married to a man who (yes, yes, as far as we can tell at this remove) appears to be the embodiment of trustworthiness and familial devotion – but despite all this, she has confessed to checking Jamie’s email, Twitter account and phone for evidence of infidelity.

I asked a group of friends whether they did likewise (with their own partners, I mean. I wasn’t at a Jamie Oliver Stalkers’ Convention). The answers ranged from a shocked “Never!” to shocked-that-I-even-had-to- ask “Always!”, plus one outlier – one of our group whose indefatigable curiosity about the world (her term) or pathological nosiness (ours) has become a running joke over the years – who said she checks everyone’s (friends, family, boyfriends) phone, emails, tweets, letters, bank statements, drawers and anything else they leave momentarily unguarded “just because I want to know.” I think we can ignore this extreme for the purposes of our discussion – I mention her only so that if you have a similar friend you can lock up your possessions next time he or she visits.

I was somewhere in the middle. In the past, I’ve often wanted to and occasionally gave in to the temptation (never found anything though. Not even a hint that one boyfriend was about to move from London to Manchester without telling me. I still try to draw comfort from the fact that he didn’t seem to think this news was worth sharing with anyone, not just me. And it still doesn’t work). But I’ve never – even during That Time of the Month, when I become entirely consumed with such paranoia and dread that you could convince me the cats were bent on emptying my bank account and destroying my life – done it with my boyfriend-now-husband. The fact that I never felt the need, even early on in our relationship, to check up on him (I just wanted to know what he was doing when he wasn’t with me, which is different, honestly) was a sign that maybe he – and we – might be marriage material.

“Snooping on your partner is wrong”