The US election week was a perfect microcosm of the nothing happens-everything happens state of this year. Its strange, stretchy timelessness – the soup of pointless, excruciating days we’re all wading through.

It was actually sort of refreshing to watch Biden experience success in the way that most of us do – slowly, incrementally, with enough opportunity to think about how it could have been better and without a balloon drop.

In between watching the endless and yet mostly news-less updates, I found time to watch the bad new adaptation of Rebecca even though I’d read enough articles that told me I shouldn’t.

But confession: I’ve never read it, so I just enjoyed how good looking everything was and was amazed to discover that despite at least a decade of assumed literary awareness I was actually totally ignorant of the twist. It made me glad I’ve refrained from pretending to have read it over the years, like I have with so many other titles.

Afterwards, I picked up my unread copy and began the work I should have done all along. It was bought new but has gained the yellow edges of a secondhand version through years of storage. On the title page I found an inscription from a girl I used to live with wishing me a happy twentieth birthday.

Remember when time used to pass?

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