Many things seem to be suffering from teething problems. On the TimesLIVE website alone I found nine references to teething in various articles published during the past three months.

One of these was in a restaurant review smothered in a silky sauce of adjectives. For the most part, the writer devoured every crispy, cloud-soft and perfectly cooked morsel on her plate, but desserts, she wrote, were: “nothing to shout about, with a dry brownie and decidedly runny crème brûlée our unfortunate endpoint. Desserts are an easy fix, however, and I’ve chalked it up to teething issues common in the first month of a restaurant opening.”..