We're both so mixed. Which languages, cultures and traditions actually matter to you, and which of them would the children get?

Multilingual is a given. I don't think it's even a decision.

English at home. That's ours, it's what we talk in, and it doesn't need justifying. German and French at school — and not international schools. I've nothing against them in principle, but they're built for expat children whose parents leave in three years, and ours won't be. If we're raising them here, they should be from here.

My German is improving. Yours is A2 on paper. Between us I estimate we have one functional German speaker and I genuinely couldn't tell you which.

Culturally: museums, building things, science, technology, aeroplanes. I intend to be insufferable about all of it.

Religion is the one I actually had to sit and think about, so here it is properly.

I'm an atheist with no agenda whatsoever. I have never tried to talk anyone out of what they believe and I'm not going to start with your mother. I don't accept a hierarchy here — not between religions, and not between believers and the rest of us. The proportion of complete dipshits doing appalling things is identical across every faith and among atheists. Every village has an idiot.

What I won't do is pretend the record is clean. An enormous amount of horrifying and stupefyingly widespread harm has been done in the name of religion, and not one of them is meaningfully worse than the others — they are all corrupt, hypocritical and out of touch in roughly equal measure. But I don't raise it unprompted. It comes out when I'm asked, or when I've sat through enough hypocrisy in one go to lose my composure.

Practically: I won't practise. I'm not going to church on a Sunday. Equally, I'm not dragging anybody to a museum of evolution.

On the children — I don't build fake realities for kids. They see straight through it, and what you actually teach them is that dishonesty is fine when convenient. They can cope perfectly well with different people in their family believing different things; children are far better at that than adults are. Which way they eventually go is entirely their own business, and if they pick up some tolerance on the way, so much the better.