‘The world has never known a love as deep as this!!!!!!’ You would be forgiven if you thought that was a line lifted out of the Matt Hancock Pandemic Diaries, published today. Given the extracts published in the Daily Mail it could be: ‘What price love? I've always known from novels that people will risk everything’. ‘To others it may seem mad, but for the person in love, the judgment to do it anyway feels right’. ‘I had recently fallen in love, and fallen in love very deeply’.

Anyway, no, despite their Hancockian flair those words do not belong to the former Health Secretary but to the 15-year-old me, as written in my own diary which is truly a masterpiece of comedy (unintentional), tragedy (inconsequential), banality (‘Mum made shepherd’s pie…’) and scandal (… ‘It wasn’t very nice’). Because my teenage diaries are still regrettably unpublished, the ‘world’ did not and would never know, which is understandable as nor did the object of my affections.

Mortifyingly, my own pandemic-era diaries – coinciding with the last time I fell in love with somebody – reveal that I am still prone to such grandiose wording some 20+ years later. But I fear the manic tones of the teenage girl in love will haunt all of us who are lucky enough to experience it (adult me has dated men with at least a decade on Hancock, and their texts and letters don’t read much differently to my adolescent boyfriends). Extreme naffness is the price we must pay for that delicious, delirious, and terrifying feeling of letting go. Despite being an (almost) universal experience, there is something about the complete override of all sense and reason that turns us into hormonal maniacs convinced of the singularity of the emotion. Words fail, and in their place? There is a little bit of all of us that is Tom Cruise jumping and air punching on Oprah. And in the age of the sincerity drought, isn’t there something charming about that unedited, unchoreographed naffness?

In matters of the heart we are all teenage girls. Or to put it more harrowingly: we are all Matt Hancock.

Laura

Image: ITV