How do you tell the difference between a sign from the universe and a coincidence? It’s been a challenging couple of weeks in my house, because my husband has been Going Through Something. In other words, Arsenal FC have been up to their old tricks. He’s their most ardent fan, a cheap seats season ticket holder (he can only see half the pitch). I stay out of it, mainly, viewing it as a vaguely amusing masochistic hobby, which probably bodes well for me in a general sense since he remains devoted even though they almost always disappoint, if not devastate him.

Recently, he has been particularly despondent. Yet again, Arsenal were on the brink of triumph, and then started playing as if they were an out of shape pub five-a-side team mistakenly welcomed on to the pitch, like that man who was waiting in the BBC reception for a job interview and ended up live on air. The Guardian’s latest match report compares this season to “watching somebody have their toenails very slowly peeled off with a set of pruning secateurs”.

My husband has been acting as though he’s the “somebody” in that simile; hobbling around, wailing, actively pained. As I began to wonder whether I should tone down my eye-rolls and take some kind of........

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