Reader, my sole remaining wisdom tooth - the one that should have been extracted decades ago, but hey, I had no dental insurance - has been sore all day. And now the right side of my mouth, where the wisdom tooth is located, is aching. Goddammit!

Earlier the husband watched the Liverpool-Real Madrid game. Liverpool lost, 3-1. I could tell when Real Madrid scored by the amount of cursing (and the volume of it) that ensued from the sitting room.

I have started reading those Bridgerton novels, because I am at the (trashy?) Regency romance stage of lockdown. Last year I had devoured plague novels, essays on the Spanish flu, and Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain. Now I crave stories about love, sweet and empty-caloried, featuring young lovely-looking people in cravats and muslin dresses fondling each other in grand homes and manicured gardens. I found epubs of the books online, saving me from shelling out at least eighty quid for the damned lot. I don't feel guilty about not buying the books, as Ms Quinn, I expect, has probably made an unimaginable amount of money from her deal with Netflix.

The books follow an easily recognisable formula: the backgrounds of hero and heroine are established, followed by the first encounter, and then another one, usually involving some verbal parrying between the two protagonists (during which the hero discovers he desires the infuriating yet disarming chit), a villain (unexamined trauma, a wicked stepmother), a bout of almost-sex, sex, and definitely more sex, a misunderstanding that leads the lovers to part, the hero discovering yes, he does love her, and usually because one of his seven siblings shows him he's been an idiot all along and then another hurdle (the villain reappears, a reputation is threatened, or a carriage overturns), before the hero declares his love, hero and heroine have more sex, and everyone lives happily after all. I snort every time the word “groin” is mentioned.

In any case, tonight's reading has distracted me from 1) the roaring from the sitting room, and 2) this goddamn wisdom tooth.

<<