The credits roll

It's half past nine, some months on. The kitchen's done and the children are down and you put on the drama, the new one, the one with the lighthouse. You say "one" to the person beside you and they say "one" back, and it's good, and at quarter past ten the keeper finds the letter and the screen goes black and the credits start, and nothing happens. The menu appears and stays there. You look at each other. "It's the daughter," they say. "It's not the daughter," you say. You put the kettle on.

You read for ten pages, in bed, with the letter in the back of your mind as a small pleasant question, and you're asleep by eleven, and the alarm at seven is an alarm and not an ambush, and Tuesday isn't flat, and at some point in the afternoon you think about the letter and look forward to half past nine, which you haven't done with a programme since you were a child and things were on once a week.

The list is in the kitchen drawer. The planned column and the watched column say the same thing most nights, one or two, and the morning column has a different word in it from the one it used to have. There was a four in it a fortnight ago, on a Friday, with a series that had a door at the end of every episode and an update that had turned the countdown back on, and you noticed at midnight and turned it off again on Saturday and didn't make anything of it.

Last Sunday it rained and you watched four episodes of the thing you'd been saving, with a pot of tea, decided at lunch, and stopped at four, and it was one of the better afternoons of the year. The subscription is still fourteen pounds. You use it more than you did, in the sense that you remember what you watch.

Your daughter, who is eleven, asked last month why the television stops now, and you told her, and she rolled her eyes, and on Thursday you heard her say "one, and then bed" to herself on the landing with her tablet, and you didn't say anything, which is a kind of thanks.

None of this is a transformation. The cliff still arrives at quarter past ten and still says what it says. You still stand up in the middle of it, most nights, with the door in your head, and the standing up still feels like leaving a room mid-sentence, and you've stopped minding, because the room is there in the morning and the morning is yours.

If you take one thing from this book, take this. Tonight, before the episode, find the setting and turn autoplay off, and say how many before you press play. That's the whole method. Everything else is detail.