Our Heroine Admits She Has a Soft Spot for Circus Peanuts and Crazy Old Coots

Y’all. I have got serious things to read. I got sucked into another book club (memo to self: is there a book club, anywhere, that I have not, at one time, been a member of?). And, in a moment of enthusiasm brought on by calzones and two glasses of red wine, I consented to lead the next discussion of Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair.

People, The End of the Affair is no lighthearted Wodehouse romp. It’s a short gray slog through “the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God.” If I’m going to lead my fellow book pumpkins through a discussion of this wee beastie, I had better get crackin’ on it and reread it, toute de suite.

Instead, I am consuming Georgette Heyer romances like circus peanuts. They are delicious confections and I can’t stop. You know what delights me? The deliberately slang-y grammar of the British aristocracy during the Regency period. I love it. Love it! I should like very much to be so awesome that that I could negligently construct sentences such as this,

“Marry her? Eh? What does the boy want to marry her for?” asked his lordship, puzzled. “It don’t seem sense to me. First the girl’s off with him, then she has a fancy for young Comyn – [to Comyn] oh, are you there, m’boy? Well, it makes no odds – and now I’ll be pinked if she hasn’t gone off again, though whom she’s gone with this time is beyond me.”

Is that just the most awesomely silly sentence? His lordship is Lord Rupert Alastair, the old, rascally uncle of the young heart-throb marquis, and, I tell you: if the aged Lord Rupert were a real person, and we both occupied the same place in time and space, I would totally want him to be my uncle so I could have him over for brandy and copious amounts of roast mutton.