Will Chrissie be found guilty of Den’s murder? Will Sam be extradited to serve her time for accessory to that murder? What about Billy and the Honey-Trap bint: will they get it on? And where is the lazy illiterate guy’s kid getting all the cash from? For the answers to these and other questions, you’ll have to go somewhere else, because I have completely given up on “Eastenderji”.

I’m not sure exactly when or how I first got sucked into this BBC soap about glottal-stop-talking losers and gangsters, but now I’ve been sucked out of it. It airs during Adam’s bath time, and I’ve been recording it to watch after he goes to bed, but recently the interesting threads have petered out and, really, I’ve got better things to do with that half-hour every day.

Take, for example, this:

Language, auspicious, charming, like a creeper,
whose minds does it not win over?

(sūkta — traditional Sanskrit maxim)

I’ve been reading this book on historical sociolinguistics for over a month now, and I’m still only up to Sanskrit? This is because, although I made quite a bit of headway (on, for example, the Assyrian question), while Magda and Adam were away, now the routine is back to normal and what with the millstone that was Eastenders around my neck, I was managing on average two-and-a-half pages nightly before settling like a mud hut in monsoon season into a puddle of my own drool.

Not that it’s boring or anything. I mean, Sanskrit! It wins my mind over in, like, six minutes, after which I am snoring “like an old whale”. I mean, according to reports. Which I have quoted directly.

I last mentioned “Eastenders” here. I last wrote about Sanskrit never.