‘No wife has the right to go to seed,’ I thundered, when I myself become a positive hayfield when I’m trying to finish a book, not washing my hair for days, hairy ankles sprouting out from ragged tracksuit bottoms. Yet not a word did I add urging husbands to exert self-control to avoid a beer belly.

Back in 1969, of course, men were expected to be masterful: ‘If a man is married to a slut,’ I pronounced fiercely, he must remonstrate with her, adding that ‘women like a firm hand.’

‘They’d probably prefer a farm hand,’ observed Leo, when he read that bit.

My recommendations were all so dogmatic. One moment I was warning wives at the pain of divorce not to run out of toothpaste or loo paper, the next telling them how to detect if their husband was having an affair: ‘If you both come home from work and the cat isn’t hungry.’ There was hardly anything about wives pursuing a career. If she needed a little money, I suggested, why not make paper flowers, or frame pictures?

Oh dear, oh dear. In mitigation, I suppose I was writing in a different age, when women’s lib had hardly been heard of. No one had dreamed up New Men or paternity leave, and two-career marriages were a rarity, particularly if the couple had children. My own youthful ambition had been to marry a man I’d fallen madly in love with, who’d whisk me away from the squalor of the typing pool. My role model was my beautiful mother, who looked after my father and us children so well because she never went out to work. My father, the breadwinner, because he called the shots, was surreptitiously nicknamed ‘Monsieur Bossy’ by my brother and me.

And yet despite the arrogance and the bossiness, I think there is good sense in much of How to Stay Married. What, I wonder, is the secret of a good marriage? Separate towns if you both snore, goes the old joke. Separate razors certainly. Today, probably separate remote controls.

My secret was to marry a really sweet man, who as I said back in 1969, had been married before. Thus after a cataclysmic row when I was tearfully packing my bags, he would reassure me that such tempests were normal in marriage and would blow over. Then he would make me laugh by saying we mustn’t let Michael, our black cat, be the victim of a broken home.