“Any idea what you’d like for your birthday?” I say to my husband, looking up from my magazine.

“Er, tuna, I think,” he says, dragging his gaze away from the review section of the Sunday paper.

I think about this for a moment. I’d actually meant, what present would you like me to buy, but I suppose I wasn’t really specific. He’s just assumed I was taking orders for his birthday supper.

How strange it is that you can live with someone for more than 30 years and still find the simplest exchange of words confusing.

You’d have thought by now we’d have developed some sort of linguistic shorthand, perhaps punctuated with the odd raised eyebrow, so that our verbal interaction was reduced to an exquisitely minimalist conversation, unintelligible to any one else but ourselves.

Instead, it’s generally unintelligible to everyone, including ourselves.

“Grilled or baked?” I ask, idly regretting the lost opportunity to have founded the world’s rarest dialect.

He shakes his paper a bit. Then he shakes his head.

“Sorry, I’ll repeat myself, “ he says.

“A tuner. A guitar tuner. For tuning my guitar.”

The paper carries on shaking, possibly because he’s trying not to laugh.

I flick over a few pages of the magazine. Blimey, this is even worse than I thought. Soon we’ll probably qualify for an interpreter. I turn another page, and my eyes catch a phrase dear to my heart.

Are you really as healthy as you think? challenges the headline. I fold the page back and read on.

My husband and I have several things in common – a liking for good food and wine, a dogged belief in the face of all contrary evidence that we will be able to answer more specialist questions on Mastermind than the expert actually sitting in the black chair – but probably our greatest emotional glue is our shared bewilderment by the ever-evolving advice from experts about how to live a healthy life. Here, it seems, may be the final answer.

I start reading out loud.

“Do you find it easy to concentrate on what you are doing?” I say.

“What?” asks my husband, looking up slowly.

“It’s a quiz,” I explain. “It will tell us whether our lifestyle is ‘consistent with a long and healthy life’…”

“So what did you ask me?”

I move on a question. The TV review pages clearly have the upper hand. For some reason, in the minds of most men, if you locate a quiz in a pub or on BBC2 it assumes the gravitas of a mission into space. But if you stick it onto the pages of a woman’s magazine it’s the equivalent of a dash down the garden to get the washing in when you notice it’s drizzling.

“Do you ever lose sleep over worry?” is the next question.

Answer comes there none.

“I said, do you ever lose sleep…?” I say, a bit louder.

He tears himself yet again away from the written opinion of someone he’s never met on a TV programme he’s never watched.

“I don’t know. Do I?” he asks vaguely.

I sigh. How would I know? How would I know if he loses sleep? I’m asleep when he might be losing sleep, so I’m not likely to notice, am I?

I give it one final go.

“Do you normally feel you play a useful part in things?” I say.

I’m not really sure where all this questioning is going myself.

I mean, Caligula probably felt he and his horse were playing a useful part in things. I bet even Sweeney Todd used to wipe off his blade and think, well, that’s another day’s work done.

“Do you think Sweeney Todd used to get job satisfaction?” I ask.

He looks up once more.

“Sometimes,” he says, sighing, “I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about.”