What do you enjoy doing with a partner, and what does your ideal boring weekend look like? Holidays, Christmas, travel, music?

It was a much better question than that.

So — the actual boring Saturday. We both wake up late, because we're both nocturnal, which is not a small thing. I've never once been with another night owl, and I hadn't realised until you how much of my life I've spent apologising for the hours I'm best in. Neither of us has to apologise. Coffee at eleven. You do your stretching, I pretend not to find it funny. In the evening we cook something properly, together — I love cooking and I've been cooking for one person for years, which is the least rewarding version of it there is. Then a show, on the sofa, the two of us, phones in another room.

Sunday: the mountain or the Rhine, whichever of us wins. Something built. Something read in the same room without either of us talking.

That's it. That's the entire ambition. Nothing announced, nothing performed.

And here's the part I don't think I've ever said properly. I love infants. Not the way people say that when they mean they'd like some eventually. What I actually love is watching them work things out — the moment a baby connects two dots that are so obvious to us we've forgotten they were ever apart, and for them it genuinely changes everything. It is the best thing I know of to watch. I've had it with my sister's children and with Georgios's grandson, and it isn't a lesser version of doing it with your own. It's a preview.

Also Lego. I've never made a secret of that and I don't intend to start.

Christmas is the one fixed thing in my family — atheists who take it absurdly seriously, because it's the one week everybody is in the same place. Travel: constantly, and badly organised. Music: I'll keep sending you things until one of them lands.

And I've decided our first series together should be Californication. Which, given the fortnight we've just had, I accept is a bold piece of programming.