Actor Adjoa, 59, met Cunnell, 58, when he was running a bookshop in the 1990s. They live together in London
Actor Adjoa Andoh first recalls meeting the author Howard Cunnell at the Battersea Arts Centre’s bookshop in 1994. “I had a theatre company called Wild Iris,” she says. “We had a tiny little office at the centre. One of our directors came in one day to say someone was taking over the bookstore downstairs, and that he was tasty.” She and her colleagues rushed to see if they could spot him. “We went in and there was Howard. He was this very smiley man behind the till in a patch of sunshine.”
She wasn’t aware that Howard had already caught a glimpse of her before, when he was moving into the shop. “There was a lovely staircase that went up to the offices. I’d seen Adjoa come down those stairs and I lost my head,” he says.