On my wedding night I hid under the bed to surprise my husband. His mother came in instead, sat down on the mattress above me, and put a call

For thirty years he has let people get his job wrong.

He says engineer. He lets them picture a

man in a van. He does not correct them at parties, at parents’ evenings, or at his own brother-in-law’s sixtieth.

And he has told me since I was about nine that being underestimated is an advantage and that you should never give it away for free.

He is proud of it. It is the closest thing our family has to a philosophy.

So I grew up extremely good at being underestimated. I am better at it than almost anybody I know.

And completely unable to tell the difference between somebody getting me wrong by accident, and somebody doing it on purpose, with a plan, over two years.