I tell everybody I like sausage but thankfully nobody has taken umbrage so far.

Speaking of food, I’ve spent a long day preparing the talk for my book tour, taking Klara from campus to orthodontist to kids’ gym, making okroshka, and unpacking, only to discover that Red Lobster is filing for bankruptcy. I love Red Lobster. I feel as aggrieved as the sushi professor from the story above but with more reason.

What a gem of a book, my friends. Exceptionally enjoyable, charming, and lovely. Some reviewers complain that nothing happens in this novel but it’s a diary of a provincial lady. What do they expect to happen? This is a book about life. Life is what happens. Normal, often clumsy, sometimes disappointing life.

I highly recommend reading Delafield’s excellent novel and then following it with Richard B Wright’s devastating remake, 70 years later, in Clara Callan.

Diary of a Provincial Lady is very funny and light-hearted but I did manage to find a disturbing subtext in it. Trust me to find disturbing subtexts in everything. The way the narrator feels in the 1930s will be extremely easy for many women to identify with today. The same endless unhappiness with her own appearance, the same terror of the word “age”, the same incapacity to end a boring conversation out of onerous politeness, the same tendency to wrap her relationship with her children in layers of guilt. Many of the provincial lady’s monologues I could be reading on Facebook today.

An excellent novel. A perfect summertime read.