I understand that marriage is pure bliss and I have achieved it.

Bliss makes people expect fireworks, and then they miss it when it turns up as a Sunday where nothing happened.

The good hours in a long marriage are almost embarrassingly plain. Two people reading in the same room, one of them occasionally reading a line out loud. Nobody makes films about it.

What gets achieved is not a finish line but a kind of ease: the ability to be in a room together without either of you having to manage it.

If today is one of the plain days, that may well be the thing itself rather than the wait for it.