Mr Kerr believed his love life was over following his wife Gladys’s death in 2004, but said he was ‘struck like a thunderbolt’ when he met Mrs Berkowitz at the North London care home they share.

He said: ‘I thought she found me pushy and conceited – until she acquired an analytical interest in the poems I read at the poetry circle I founded when I moved in here. Then we found our affinities.’