My Bonnie: How dementia stole the love of my life. John Suchet

that my job started to go rather well. A close colleague, the reporter and newscaster Carol Barnes, who was to die so tragically young, said to me about this time, ‘Do you know, before you went to Washington you were a complete bastard. You argued with everyone. Now you’re actually quite nice.’

      In the autumn of 2004, my concerns about Bonnie were mounting. An odd remark here or there, something forgotten that should have been remembered, confusion about entries in the kitchen diary—the sort of things you put down to the ageing process, something that happens to us all. But after what had happened at the airport, I couldn’t help worrying. To begin with I joked with Bonnie: ‘You’ve got Alzheimer’s, that’s what you’ve got.’ It’s not really that tasteless—more gallows humour between two people who love each other very much, maybe an attempt to ward off the evil spirits.

      But she must have caught the concern in my voice. In the spring of 2005, we were invited to the annual Arnold Bennett commemoration dinner up in his birthplace in the Potteries. I was to give a little speech, then propose a toast to the immortal memory. It was nice to do something so completely different. I am not an Arnold Bennett expert, but I do have something in common with the great under-rated English novelist. I happen to live in the same block of flats in London where he spent his final years and where he died.