How we met: Jonathan Dimbleby AND Bel Mooney

The broadcaster and TV interviewer, Jonathan Dimbleby (48) was born in Aylesbury, the son of veteran broadcaster Richard Dimbleby. He was educated at Charterhouse School, and went on to study philosophy at University College, London, where he met his wife Bel Mooney (46), who is a novelist and childrens' author and broadcaster. She was born in Liverpool, and went to Trowbridge Girls High School in Wiltshire. Her latest novel, The Lost Footsteps, will be published in March. The couple live in London's Notting Hill Gate and have two teenage children, Daniel and Kitty.

BEL MOONEY: Some guy who fancied me wanted me to write an article on South Africa, so he took me in and introduced me to the editor of the college newspaper. The next time we met, Jonathan said: 'It's quite nicely written. I'm going to use it.' And I said, 'Don't be so patronising]' I had great front, I always have.

Jonathan was 23 and I was 21. All the other chaps I met in those days were frightfully fly-by-night-ish, didn't know what they wanted to do, and here was someone who did. He wanted to make a home and be together - it just seemed grown-up. He was also tremendously clever, which I liked; he was reading philosophy. I was very proud of him.

We met at the end of October 1967, and we got married in February 1968. Jonathan asked me properly to marry him on Boxing Day. He'd actually already said it - we went to a Wimpy bar on Oxford Street in November, literally just after we'd met, and he said, 'Would you marry me?' and I said, 'Yes, I would,' and that was that - we'd only known each other four weeks or something.

My dad came to London to do up a bedsit for me; he slapped some wallpaper on. When I told my mother, who is a down-to-earth woman, that Jon had asked me to marry him, she quipped: 'Let the wallpaper dry first.' They were very thrilled, slightly overawed because he was Richard Dimbleby's son - to their generation, Dimbleby was the greatest broadcaster this country has produced.

In 1968, it was so old-fashioned, but there was a Tutor to Women Students at UCL, and if you got married - which was unusual - I discovered you were supposed to ask her permission. I received a letter summoning me to see her. Finally I went, and she said, 'You're married'. I said, 'Yes' and she replied 'You realise that there is a college rule under which any female student marrying while an undergraduate has to seek permission?' I was over 21, so I said 'You must be joking. Anyway it's done. Goodbye.'

We created our own little world and then we withdrew. What was marvellous about it was the stability. We settled down to a life of domesticity and work - we were very serious about it. Jonathan worked in one room and I in the other - it was a two-roomed flat, with a desk in the bedroom and in the living-room. It was lovely, a tremendously happy time. I had a little budget, and would only spend five shillings a night on meat. But you could get a chicken for 10 shillings - so that would do two meals.

We haven't changed a lot since - not in essentials. We talk a lot. We carve out time to be together - sometimes it's hard. If I'd been the kind of woman who flaked out and said 'No, no, you must be with me,' and all that demanding stuff, we wouldn't have survived.

If you suffer pain as a couple, it can drive you apart. In our case, when our baby was stillborn and then when we had Kitty and she was very ill, we shared it totally and it was incredibly bonding. My grief was different, greater in that I was the mother and had been through the carrying and the labour, more intense, more anguished. Jonathan was someone to cling to, a pillar. He was amazing.

Family is the most important thing in my life - I'm completely besotted by my children. We wanted to create a stable background for our children, and I love it. He's daddy, I'm mummy - I like that. Low points make it all the better. Marriage is bloody difficult and an incredibly hard test of character. Any couple will have looked at each other at some point and thought, 'Jesus, I'd like not to be with you', but the thing is that for whatever reason, we hung in there.

JONATHAN DIMBLEBY: I remember the first time I saw Bel as if it were yesterday - not 25 years ago. I was sitting behind my desk in the office of the university magazine I was editing. The door opened, and this figure walked in. I immediately thought, 'This is the most extraordinary looking person.' She was wearing a sort of sweater and a very short skirt, her face was very alive and I though she looked beautiful, intelligent, sexy. I had immediate palpitations. In the intervening hours between the first sighting and the second sighting, I made discreet enquiries. I rapidly discovered that she was widely regarded as the star of the English department and half the world was in love with her, because she had these great big eyes and this rather good mind.

Bel could talk about poetry, and she could recite it: reams of Eliot and Yeats. It sounds very fuddy-duddy, but very early on we sat and read to each other in the evenings. We came together and the rest of the university completely disappeared.

In my case, there was a great passion: I wanted to be with Bel, and I felt that every hour when I wasn't with her was an hour wasted. I asked Bel about getting married up by the White Horse at Westbury Hills, on Boxing Day of 1967. It was a cold, frosty day. I love walking, but Bel doesn't walk anywhere. Since that day, she hasn't walked more than 30 yards without asking where the bus is. We stood by the white horse looking at the view, and I said: 'Shall we get married?' - or something like that.

We felt then that there was no point in delaying very much. We were living together before we were married, but I wanted, wisely or unwisely, to make it an absolute commitment. Not a question mark, not just for so long as it might last. And, quite accidentally, it proved to be OK. I think it's complete luck that you make the right decision.

On the day of the wedding, a Harrods van delivered a small bunch of violets to the flat - I thought this mini grand gesture was appropriate. I remember feeling exceptionally self- conscious walking back down the street from the registry office, surrounded by the photographers. I couldn't understand why on earth the Evening Standard should want a photograph of us getting married in such a very modest way.

After the wedding, on the way down to Devon, we stopped at a rather dreary hotel to have a cup of tea, and Bel dropped her contact lens. We spent ages - about 45 minutes - scrabbling around and I was thinking to myself: 'What have I done?' There was this sense of anti-climax, a terrible 'Oh God, we've done it, I'm landed with this situation that I've created for myself.' And Bel was getting very upset because she couldn't find her contact lens, and without it she couldn't read, and this was going to be a gloomy February nightmare in Devon. Eventually this bloody thing turned up, stuck on her coat - the first of many such occasions.

An awful lot of people get together on a permanent basis in a similar way to us - based on strong passion, the desire to be together, and then find out that they're not compatible. I'm very chary, therefore, of saying that the fact that we've made 25 years is evidence of what you can do if you work at marriage, and have a remarkable character. It's the contrary: what you do all the way through is say 'This is actually what I want rather than anything else.' I think it sounds incredibly complacent to say 'We worked hard at our marriage.' Whenever I hear people say that, I always think: 'Pass me the sick-bag.' I've never been in that position. Your feelings, your drive, your sense of what you are and why you want to be together simply comes to the fore and you can't help yourself.

If I try to picture myself not married, suddenly the world is so fragmented and broken that I can't concentrate. Marriage has to be the most important thing in my life, but I don't actually think of it that way - it's just part of me.

(Photograph omitted)