We were having a quiet night in, readers. (Living in a cul-de-sac, it’s quite peaceful here in the evenings, unless we’re hosting a soirée.) We’d just made ourselves a late snack of a tasty baguette – preceded by a small apéritif, and a few canapés serving as hors d’oeuvre – as the au pair is on holiday in Paris this week with the chauffeur, taking in some haute couture.

As we relaxed on the chaise-longue, pondering an indulgent dessert of a chocolate eclair or some crème brûlée, we glanced at Twitter, in the hope of being amused by a few bon mots in the milieu of the internet. Sadly, the reality was a cliché.

We’ve never felt so divorced from the zeitgeist.

Suddenly the joie de vivre of the evening was kaput. Sighing, we opened a bottle of lager – although in truth that would have been de rigueur for the time of night anyway. A crushing sense of déjà vu overtook us as we wearily contemplated the latest effort of this tedious provocateur yet to move on from the style of his debut.

(The kindest thing we could say about the oafish amateur blogger, who we generally refer to by a sobriquet, is that it takes chutzpah to be such an imbecile in public.)

There was no point in hoping for détente, and certainly not a concordat. This doyen of the frothing Yoon community – this entrepreneur turned would-be enfant terrible that a clique of desperate pundits cling to in lieu of a proper expert – would never recognise the crassness of his faux pas, and wouldn’t be executing a volte-face.

His sour, lazy critique wasn’t a tour-de-force from a formidable raconteur. There wasn’t so much as a soupçon of wit or panache about it. Au contraire: its sole raison d’être was sabotage, a volley of flak barely worthy of a kindergarten or a crèche – little more, really, than dreck from a poseur sitting smugly in his pied-à-terre admiring the gauche décor and the tacky, garish objets d’art typical of the nouveau riche.

In truth we were too filled with ennui to think of a decent riposte. We contemplated a pastiche, perhaps written under the nom de plume of a coquettish brunette femme fatale, but on reflection we felt that the genre was tired and such a plan would carry no cachet. We were at an impasse. We had nada. Bupkis. We needed a montage.

None of our ideas had the necessary je ne sais quoi, and we felt a terrible sense of malaise. Here we were, a bunch of klutzes unable to develop a motif, let alone start a mêlée – a scene we’re normally more than au fait with (some might call it our forte, perhaps our defining marque). There was no prospect of delivering a coup de grâce.

So we were hors de combat. We’d wanted to launch a blitzkrieg but we couldn’t even come up with a decent spiel. There was nothing in our repertoire. We pictured our detractors as voyeurs enjoying the glow of schadenfreude en masse, and wished we had a protégé to delegate the task to (or at least have a good tête-à-tête about it with), but in their absence decided the best route was to adopt a laissez-faire attitude.

“C’est la vie”, we shrugged.