Like everyone else this week, I’ve been bingeing on Normal People. I’d say it made a nice change from bingeing on Kettle crisps and gin, but I managed that too, in a neat bit of multi-tasking. You have to gorge on Normal People, because each episode (there are twelve) is only half an hour long, and at the end of each episode, you just need to find out if they’re going to have sex again (spoiler alert - they are).

Normal People is weird, and I’m referring to both the book and the TV show here. Let’s take the book first. Once I’d got over the speech marks thing, I gobbled it up in a day, just guzzled the whole thing like a lockdown chocoholic after a home-school day. It’s as guiltily addictive as one of those gory thrillers where every chapter ends on a cliffhanger, the desperate parent edging ever-closer to their abducted child, while the baddie prepares to release radioactive poison into the water supply. Except it isn’t that; it’s just a young couple circling each other, occasionally hooking up, then drifting off again. That’s it. Why was I so compelled to keep reading? Maybe it was just the sex – the horny, thorny, explicit, and very frequent sex. Like 50 Shades, but without the clit-lit shame. Anyway, I absolutely smashed it, and afterwards had an awkward, morning-after moment with myself, wondering why I couldn’t put it down. I feel pretty much that way about the TV show, but have a few extra thoughts.

Firstly, Marianne is way too beautiful and smart from the off. In the book, she’s pretty freaky in the beginning, definitely borderline weird, and it’s only later as she grows into her looks that she becomes more conventionally attractive and ‘normal’. But Daisy Edgar-Jones is just unequivocally stunning from the start, even drabbing down in a school blazer. Plus, rather than being odd, she’s quite impressively sarky with her teachers, and seemingly unfazed by the frankly baffling ribbing she gets from her classmates. Why are they having a go? She’s fit, cool, clever, and lives in a great house. The lads should be falling over themselves for a ride. It just doesn’t make sense. Secondly, Connell’s mum must have had him when she was 6 years old. She’s waaaay too young to have sprogged that strapping young man, and it’s distracting. I liked Lorraine a lot in the book, and Sarah Greene looks right for the role, if it was filmed in 2030.

The whole thing is beautifully shot, languid cutaways of trees waving in the breeze and tender close-ups of necks clashing with the unwelcome clamour of Other Normal People getting in Marianne and Connell’s way, muddying the path of true lust. But ultimately, despite looking nice, I worried it was all a bit small, this slight, self-conscious love story that doesn’t really go anywhere, beckoning you and tricking you into thinking it’s bigger and better than it is.

But, oh God, the Irish accents, and they’re so young and gorgeous and remember when you were at school and fancied someone and found yourself at university and had firm skin and rode on a bike with your arms in the air that summer. It’s all there, all the feelings, and it tugged me in like it was always going to, so I binged on crisps and gin and fumbly romps, and enjoyed it all enormously.

I might have to read the book again, goddammit.

• Normal People, BBC Three, 12 episodes