Several hours a day are spent searching for credit cards, paper knives and spectacles, or a glass of wine left in an alcove in another room. The other day, we spent an acrimonious half-hour missing Downton Abbey as we searched frantically for the remote control, only to find Leo was sitting on it.

Having never mastered the metric system, I am utterly defeated by grams in cookery. Last week, as his red pair of cords plummeted to the floor, Leo announced he’d lost ten kilometres in weight.

Invitations and letters disappear in chucked-away newspapers, so people roll up unexpectedly for drinks or even dinner.

‘You never told me they were coming.’

‘I did, I did, but you never listen.’

But though domestic chaos is come again, I still believe that a happy marriage is the best thing life has to offer, cemented as much by the moments of irritation as of tenderness.

‘For everyone, particularly children,’ claimed Cecil King in 1969, ‘the essential basis for security and happiness is a loving home.’

To counteract this, hideous recently released statistics reveal that 50 per cent of children today can expect their parents to split up by the time they are sixteen. More tellingly, a vast 80 per cent of these splits happen to unmarried couples. Marriage, for all its limitations, makes people try harder.

Children above all long for their parents to stay together. When a teacher asked one little girl to define love, she wistfully replied: ‘Daddy and Mummy getting married.’

So I hope, despite some arrogance and smugness, that by charting the very real joys as well as the pitfalls — and panic stations — of our early years together, I may reassure and encourage more couples: married, unmarried, gay and straight, to stay together more happily.