Real life

As I don’t live in what my friends consider to be ‘town’, I don’t get many visitors. My friends who live in ‘town’ protest that they cannot possibly be presumed upon to come as far as Balham. For a long time, I used to mind about this and made all sorts of silly attempts to

I will always remember what I was doing the night I tried to downgrade my Sky package. Scorched into my memory with pain it is, just like the day Elvis died. It started ominously. I had turned on the television. I only turn on the television once every six months. Every time I do so

The recession has been a huge disappointment to me. It’s the lack of haggling I find so hard to come to terms with. When the great financial crisis began we were told we were going to get all sorts of eye-watering bargains. Everything was negotiable, it was said. Even the cheese counter at the supermarket

This will be a bit of harmless fun, I thought, as I climbed three flights of stairs to the top of a building in theatreland in search of a fancy-dress costume. I found myself in a room full of rails crammed tight with bright costumes. And there, standing in front of them, was the strangest

Sometimes the irritations are so great, you just have to stand up and be irritating right back. So it was that I found myself loitering under an ugly new sign at the bottom of my road, holding a petition. ‘Excuse me, sir? Would you like to protest about these horrible signs? They cost £1,000 of

You couldn’t make it up If I’m ever stuck for a plot for a dark and twisted dystopian sci-fi novel I must remember to open my front door and start a conversation with a traffic warden. You are always guaranteed a richly surreal and deeply macabre experience when you engage with the bizarre regime of

Hotels frighten me. I can only approach them armed with industrial-strength earplugs, a box of teabags, a jar of Marmite, an orthopaedic pillow, a towelling robe and slippers that fit, a large bag of apples, some bottles of mineral water, a scented candle and a DVD boxset of Columbo. ‘What the hell have you got

Just when I thought the junk mail on my doormat couldn’t get any more pointless, a record-breakingly worthless form of advertising has begun to pour in. It’s from my local Labour council showing off the inventive new ways it has found of spending my money. The other day I got a leaflet telling me about

The insufferably smug family in the BT commercials is now more than an annoyance to me. Whenever I see them, I throw whatever I have in my hands at the television set and scream, ‘Liars!’. I have hated the BT family for years. Unlike the Oxo family, which was reassuringly grouchy and came to the

What a pleasure it has been to have workmen digging up my street. No, seriously. I want to pay tribute to British Gas and Morrison and all the other contractors who have been tunnelling into my home, tearing out shrubs and ripping up floorboards in order to lay horrible-looking pipes attached to huge and hideous

When I arrive on my deathbed the thing that will torment me most is the amount of time I’ve spent on the phone to Vision Express arguing about when my eye test is due. It reduces me to tears when I think of the wasted hours spent trying to reason with twenty-somethings puffed up into

One of my enduring preoccupations is that somehow, some day, I will figure out a way to ‘beat the system’. Every now and then I get a little spurt of ‘system-beating’ activity when a particular injustice I am fighting — I have several dozen on the go at any one time — comes to a

Writer’s block On my to-do list: ‘Write letter to sponsored child’. It’s been there for months but I can’t shift it. It’s proving more stubborn than ‘send tax return stuff to accountant’. I had been really looking forward to it in the beginning. I had imagined myself sitting in my study like Jack Nicholson in

I’m a sucker for insurance. If you are naturally suspicious and inclined to pessimism then insurance is a drug you have no control over. You are either fantasising about how you can get more of it, or else desperately trying to make do with less of it. No matter how you adjust the dosage you

My chestnut mare has almost as many emotional problems as me. There was a time when this suited us both, being two badly behaved women together. I bought her when I was feeling rebellious and free spirited. I liked the flash of defiance in her eyes. I enjoyed being accosted every time I turned up

There was something hideously inevitable about the whole thing. I should have known it was going to happen. It was the most obvious thing in the world, when you think about it. I picked up my car from the Peugeot garage, having spent £1,200 on repairs taking two weeks and more arguing with mechanics than

Being a naturally negative person I make it my business to subscribe to something called ‘Marty Dow’s positive-thought service — We can change the world one thought at a time!’ These are nice little ‘affirmations’ which arrive in my personal email exhorting me to breathe, fill my thoughts with light, visualise myself as a child

After my triumph in extracting strong antibiotics from a local GP surgery, I decide to press ahead with this exciting project of getting something back for my taxes. I want to help myself to some of the services at those women’s health clinics one is always hearing about. Ministers are forever singing their praises and

‘Do not go to the NHS walk-in centre, it will only upset you.’ This was the advice from a friend last week as I drove around Tooting with earache searching in vain for St George’s Hospital. How a building with 1,000 beds and 6,000 staff is undetectable to the naked eye is a wonder to