If you feel like days have become grindingly long, it’s because they have. Spurned by the moon, which is in constant retreat (two centimetres a year) its proximity to our blue-green orb nevertheless means it continues to strip momentum from our axial spin, making our days longer. Bastard. By a whole 500th of a second every 100 years! So, what are you doing with all that extra time? Watching Netflix like me, no doubt. Now that we know COVID alone is not to blame for all the dross on Netflix (stupid moon!) we can be more discerning as to our choice of distractions. Unless you’re married to my wife, in which case you watch what she tells you to watch.
Case in point, Emily in Paris. Lily Collins plays the eponymous Emily, an American who moves to Paris to have sex with impossibly good-looking French guys, and sometimes work at a marketing firm. One-dimensional American meets stereotypically-nasty French peeps. They hate gauche Em initially, of course, but slowly warm to her. Going nowhere near the terra incognita of the suburban banlieues, poor anorexic Emily lives, works, jogs, dines and fornicates in the tourist heart of Paris. I don’t think she even strays as far as Sacré-Cœur. And there’s a second series, apparently? AND it’s been nominated for like a dozen Golden Globes?? Clearly the coronavirus does novel things to brain chemistry, because last year Fleabag won. I know, nobody cares abut the GG’s, but there are principle at stake. I’m sure Lilly Collins is giddy as shit right now. Quelle surprise!
There were other transgressions into banality last year. Most seemed to feature a lot of passive-aggressive Americans with overly-whitened teeth, overly-filled lips and bad attitudes screeching “No, fuck you!” at each other. Which does get tiresome. But back to Emily (second series, right?) the only thing that could make this worse would be if Emily starts posting Insta recipes for her ‘upcoming cookbook’. I mean, she’s thin, pretty and American, so why not? The world definitely needs another one of those! Steal recipes from the handsome chef, substitute cloves and cinamon for cardamom, et voila! If that does happens, then my wife is on her own. I’ll be watching re-runs of Seinfeld in the bedroom.
