She poked at a small strip of lamb with the tip of her spoon. In any ethnic restaurant it was our practice to doubt the provenance and more particularly the species of the meat. This dated from a tour-group holiday three years earlier, in which we had spent a short time in the company of a meat inspector from Darwin.

“What do you think this is?”

“Meat,” I said.

“Aren’t we all?”

The problem with my ex-wife was bluntness and aggressive passivity that would make a cliff seem friendly, from top or bottom. And stubbornness. She sat there without eating and without rising.

Kunzru believes that thanks to technological advances human beings sometimes behave like robots. “We are kind of cyborgs already,” he says. “This is a cyborg operation, two people attached to the international phone network, able to speak to each other as a kind of assemblage of machines. The networks are also getting quite intimate with our bodies. We’re not too far off a lot of the functions currently in our phone handsets. It was once in a desktop, then it went onto our laps, now it’s in our hands, pretty soon it will be attached to our bodies, then one day maybe in our bodies. At that point we are going to be proper cyborgs.”

Looking back, I suppose it was a strong statement about my faith in our relationship that I never even tried to learn how to make the tomato sauce. I assumed he would always be there to make it for me, until one day he was not.