Little irritants drivethat YOU crackers
Baby On Board signs. Calling chips ‘French fries’. And dinner guests who bring flowers instead of wine...
price it, then I can’t be bothered to buy it. Then there are those sachets of tomato sauce which are impossible to open, and if you do it goes all over your hands. A. Brownsword, Brackley, northants. My blood boils in the supermarkets when I see bone idle shoppers decide they don’t want their frozen chickens and dump it among the fruit or in the cake aisle. This must be costing a fortune in wastage.
JOAN EVANS, Manchester. I use the same Tube train at the same time every day and try to avoid all the sniffers and snorters. Can’t you hear yourself how annoying it is? yuck, yuck, yuck!
JACKIE CLARE, Hertfordshire. BASICALLY saying basically all the time, basically.
CHRIS JENKINS, Havant, Hampshire. I feel niggled by nearly everything that has changed since 1999!
This includes modern fashion — girls with huge sixtiesstyle hair buns and loud shoes that don’t flatter their legs.
Then there’s today’s young men with National service ‘short back and sides’ teamed with overpowering tattoos and trousers that cling like leggings.
and those horrid beards that should have stayed where they belong — in sunday night costume dramas. JOHN RUTHERFORD, sevenoaks, kent. ADULT cyclists who ride on the pavement and throw a hissy fit if you point out that their place is on the road.
DAPHNE CONSTANTINE, Ashdown forest, East sussex. The increasing use of ‘human’ as a noun, when it is an adjective. We are ‘ human beings’ or ‘ human kind’, not humans.
DEREK wilks, East sussex. PEOPLE who adds the letter ‘k’ to the end of words like ‘something’, ‘ everything’, ‘ nothing’ — or ‘anythink’ else with ‘ing’ endings. GEOFF GAROGHAN,
Brandon, suffolk. ANYONE who is ‘passionate’ about anything and everything, no matter how insignificant that ‘thing’ is. like the TV celebrity chefs and MasterChef contestants who are passionate about a lettuce leaf, a vanilla pod, scones or whatever they’re cooking. That, and Russell brand. sorry — can’t carry on. Got to go for a lie down before I explode.
MARK HENNESSY, Essex. Those stupid high fives at cricket matches. stop it.
Kenneth LEE, via email. TV PRESENTERS who ask the audience to ‘give it up’ for whoever is coming on to the stage. Give what up? It doesn’t make sense.
MARY VENTON, via email. I am sick of people who start a sentence with ‘d’you know what...’ as if what they’re about to say is going to be interesting. It never is. PERDITA, cambridge, via Mail online. CALL-CENTRE operatives who ask me how I am today. One day I’ll tell them. Then there are the cold callers who tell me they are not trying to sell me anything. Pull the other one.
VALERIE GEORGE, via email. The phrase ‘we like to queue in this country’. I’ve never met anyone who likes doing so. More likely, they mean we prefer queuing to pushing and shoving.
PAMELA THOMAS, london. The pronunciation of the current year. It is ‘twenty fifteen’ not ‘two thousand and fifteen’!
a century ago in 1915, they did not s ay ‘ one t housand nine hundred and fifteen’.
MALCOLM WREN, Hampshire. SHOP assistants who say ‘you all right there?’ when I am waiting to be served. YVONNE ASHTON,
torquay, devon. The use of the word ‘star’ to describe anyone who appears on any talent or reality show. The most annoying example was benefits street when the majority of these socalled ‘stars’ have never done an honest day’s work in their lives.
STEVEN DATE, Basingstoke, Hampshire. My PET niggle is the word amazing. It’s used extensively to describe anything and everything, most of which is not amazing at all.
Then you get the sales staff who say ‘ brilliant!’ after every question you answer — even if your just giving your name. PATRICK KAVANAGH, Hertfordshire.