Top of my ambitions for this year: be less nice. Do fewer good turns. Be less amenable and most of all a lot less kind to animals. While this sounds a bit grim, you have to consider that I am starting from a very high base. If I go out of my way to be
Putting a letter through the slot of a rubbish bin and pointing your car key at the front door of your house are fairly good indicators of stress, I think it is fair to say. I found myself doing both these things this week as I floundered around in the Christmas rush, trying to reorder
So much for ‘make do and mend’. I’ve been desperately trying to patch things up in the spirit of credit-crunch thriftiness but I am getting absolutely nowhere. This is because shops do not stock ‘the bits’ any longer. I have spent the last week trying to do DIY jobs around the house and I can
I try not to be a party pooper but the other night I came home to such a cacophony of revelling from a neighbour’s house that I concluded there had to be a gathering of international gangsters, drug barons and hookers in my street. The thumping hip hop, screaming and glass smashing was coming from a
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
As leadership hopefuls go, Ed Balls is not the most obvious candidate to win hearts and minds. A divisive figure behind the scenes and a stilted performer in front of the camera, he has — to put it politely — not always exhibited the qualities most closely associated with future prime ministers. But his reputation
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
Melissa Kite says that the PM is ill at ease with female colleagues. No surprise that it was the women — Blears, Flint, Kennedy — who rebelled while the men hid under the table Remember the Brown Bounce? Yes, there really was one. It was back in September 2007 and Gordon was riding high on