I have a lovely husband. We’ve been together for a very long time; 50 years in November, to be precise. We are growing old together and, by and large, we jog along very well. Like all long-term couples, there are things about him which get on my nerves and things about me that get on his. But, as he’s very particular about how things get done and I am much more slapdash, we complement and irritate in equal measure.

The voice coming from my car is like a disembodied back-seat driver.Credit: Getty

One of his particularities, however, is the management of time. This means he sets an alarm on his phone whenever he makes an appointment or wants to remind himself of something.

May I just quietly repeat that? He sets an alarm on his phone!

The result of this is that our days are punctuated by his phone going off like a frog in a sock, quite often when he has gone off to do whatever it is he does with our cows in a distant paddock. This means I need to find his phone, find my glasses (so I hit STOP and not SNOOZE) and switch the bloody thing off, all while associating my husband’s name with some very rude words.

When I ask him later what the alarm was for, he can rarely recall, making the whole........

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