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My cultural education was not confined to music, but extended all the way to contemporary dance, a form that I found entirely impenetrable, entirely opaque. There seemed to be no language for it. What was I meant to say? ‘I liked the way they threw themselves against the wall’?

‘It’s not about what you liked and didn’t like,’ Connie would reply, ‘it’s about what it made you feel.’ More often than not, it made me feel foolish and conventional. The same applied to theatre, which had always seemed to me like a funereal form of television; since the time of the Greeks, had anyone ever left a play saying, ‘I just wished it were longer!’ Clearly I’d been going to the wrong shows. We saw plays in tiny rooms above pubs and promenaded around vast warehouses, saw a blood-soaked Midsummer Night’s Dream set in an abattoir, a pornographic Private Lives, and I was never bored. How could I be? It was a rare night in the theatre that didn’t involve someone brandishing a dildo, and over time I became inured, or at least learnt to disguise my shock, because if this was a cultural education, it was also a form of audition. I wanted to like what Connie liked because I wanted Connie to like me. So things were no longer ‘wacky’. Now they were ‘avant-garde’.

In fairness, I enjoyed a great many of the cultural events, particularly the movies (‘films’ we called them now), which were very different to the escapist fare I had previously favoured, and rarely featured interstellar drive, a serial killer on the loose or bombs counting down to zero. Now we went to the cinema to read. Little independent cinemas that sold coffee and carrot cake and showed foreign films about cruelty, poverty and grief; occasional nudity, frequent brutality. Why, I wondered, did people seek out portrayals of the very experiences that, in real life, would send them mad with despair? Shouldn’t art be an escape, a laugh, a comfort, a thrill? No, said Connie, exposure brought understanding. Only by confronting the worst traumas of life could you comprehend them and face them down, and off we’d trot to watch another play about man’s inhumanity to man. On which subject, we also went to gigs — it amused Connie to hear me say the word ‘gig’ — and I’d do my best to jump around and make some noise when told to do so.

The opera, too. Connie had a friend who worked at the opera — of course she did — and we’d get cheap tickets to see Verdi, Puccini, Handel, Mozart. I loved those evenings, often more than Connie, and if the director had transposed the action of Così fan tutte to a Wolverhampton dole office, I could still close my eyes, reach for her hand and listen to that wonderfully organised sound.

Do I sound like a philistine? Unsophisticated and uncouth? Perhaps I was, but for every gritty four-hour film about Gulag life, there was another that was stylish, intelligent and affecting in ways that were rarely found in the multiplex. Even the dance was beautiful in its way, and I was grateful. My wife educated me; a common phenomenon, I think, and one that is rarely or only begrudgingly acknowledged by the husbands that I know. As a scientist, I had sometimes been sceptical and resentful of the great claims made for The Arts — widened horizons, broadened minds, freed imagination — but if culture was improving then yes, I was improved. And yes, I know, Hitler loved the opera too, but I still felt strongly that my life had been altered in some indefinable way. I hesitate to use the word ‘soul’. Certainly life felt richer, but was this due to contemporary dance or the person by my side?

I’m troubled by the past tense. Connie was, Connie once, Connie used to. In the early days of our relationship, we made a vow: we would never be too tired to go out, we would always ‘make an effort’, but this was one of those solemn vows we were destined to break. Perhaps there were simply fewer things she wanted to show me, but we gradually became less adventurous after we married, after we left London, after we became parents. Inevitably, I suppose; you can’t go on dates for twenty-four years, it’s not practical. And who would want to go to a gig now? What would we eat, where would we sit, what would we do with our hands? We could always do something else instead. Go to Paris, go to Amsterdam.

But I still listen to Mozart, alone in my car rather than high up in the gods with Connie at my side. Selected highlights, greatest hits. I have a fine in-car stereo system, top-of-the-range, but still the music is barely audible above the roar of the air-conditioning and rush hour on the A34. Over-familiar, the music has become a kind of audio-Valium, background music rather than something I listen to actively and attentively. A gin and tonic after a long day. A shame, I think, because while each note remains the same, I used to hear them differently. It used to sound better.