Items I would like to see consigned to Room 101:
- Cats
- Pigeons
- Cats amongst pigeons
- People who feed cats and/or pigeons
- People who say, “I’m more of a cat person, myself”
- Dumfries
- Children in pubs
- Curtain tie-backs
- Curtain-pulls
- Shower curtains
- Pelmets
- People in front of you who walk/drive just too slowly
- Long jokes
- Fundamentalism (of any kind)
- Clowns
- Mass-produced sausages
- Any sport done to music
- Any sport where points are awarded for artistic interpretation
- Any sport which is only ever participated in by women
- Wind farms (i.e. wind power-stations)
- Pseudo-science
- Vegetarian food masquerading as meat
- Pubs with fake Olde English names
- Pubs with the word furkin in their names
- People who change pubs’ names
- Gazumping
- Best of albums containing previously unreleased tracks
- People who say question mark when they mean question
- Offal
- people who say ‘alternate’, when they mean ‘alternative’
- Nitro-keg bitter
- Shopping for clothes
- Shopping for food
- People on your side in an argument who can’t argue properly
- People on your side in an argument who can argue, but who are dickheads
- Astrologers and other soothsaying charlatans
- The music of Phil Collins
- People whose hi-fi systems are more valuable than their music collections
- People whose cars are more valuable than their music collections
- People who say CDs sound better than vinyl (they really need to listen)
- Being told that my call is important while I’m on hold in a queue
- Decorating
- People who boast I never understood [X] at school, who still don’t
- UHT milk
- People without cars who think everyone should use public transport
- Drinking good whisky from cheap glasses
- Copper coins
- The phrase the Home Counties
- Software with far more features than it needs
- Royalty
- The Nobility
- Fax technology
- People with ridiculous theories who cite Galileo as a persecuted forerunner
- Amplified music in pubs
- Appending the suffix -gate to anything with even a hint of scandal
- Appending the suffix -rage to a noun instead of simply saying impatience
- People who put the stress on the first syllable of the word Birkenhead
- Having your blood pressure taken
- Tea from vending machines
- People who use K as an abbreviation for thousand when talking about money
- People who say grand instead of thousand
- Cushions
- Dog shows
- Fast food which isn’t fish & chips
- People who abbreviate the word and to ‘n’
- Wimbledon fortnight
- Band-waggon-jumper-oners [to use my dad’s wonderful phrase]
- People who like 2 amuse U with their wacky spelling
- Spam (in both its electronic and culinary forms)
- Junk mail and unsolicited phone calls
- Any telephone conversation which lasts longer than 60 seconds
- Pogonophobia
- People who use the word literally when talking figuratively
- Continental-style toilets where you have to crap onto a ledge
- People who use apostrophe’s to denote plural’s
- The phrase he or she (what’s wrong with they?)
- People who claim lager is much better on the continent (it’s still shite)
- Sticky price labels which leave a mark when you remove them
- Sticky labels on fruit
- Safety matches
- Lottery millionaires who say it won’t change their lives
- Newspapers
- Mowing the lawn
- Mobile phone tunes
- Adding anything to whisky
- Housing estates named after the flora destroyed to build them
- Cold beer
- Motorists who use hazard warning lights to indicate illegal parking
- Brass fixtures and fittings
- Replacing swear-words with f__*ing asterisks
- Bleeped-out swear-words on television
- Coloured bathroom suites
- Saturday evening television
- Receiving personal emails from paedophiles [I write from experience]
- Having to wear a tie to appear professional
- Mild cheese
- The expression too clever by half
- CDs with a long gap before the final track
- Spongey bread
- Cryptic crosswords themed on extremely obscure subjects
- Cryptic crosswords that hinge upon a single clue
- People who say Cleese was the funniest Python (it was Palin, you idiots!)
- Screws with slots, as opposed to cross-heads
- Brass screws
- Single sheets inserted into double-sheet newspapers
- Letterboxes which are too small for the letters you want to post
- Slugs
- Mensa
- Anyone who talks about IQ as if it actually means anything
- Fish- and steak-knives
- Chewing gum
- The white powder that accumulates around the tops of milk bottles
- Cyclists who undertake at traffic lights
- Cyclists who go through red traffic lights
- Cyclists who ride on the pavement
- Background music on TV news bulletins
- People who make sexist/racist comments in front of you, assuming you agree
- Police cars driving at 68mph in the slow lane on motorways
- English wine
- The phrase post-modern
- This colour
- Flannel face-cloths
- Dove™ soap
- Baby On Board signs
- Ironing
- Soldering
- Evangelical feminists
- The smell of money
- British pub licensing hours
- Birmingham
- People who make meaningless comparisons
- Moths
- Mixed vegetables
- Christian fish logos on cars
- People at the front of queues who haven’t decided what to buy yet
- The new shrink-wrapped KitKat™ bars
- People who get into the same segment as you in revolving doors
- Wrapping presents
- Self-appointed spokespersons
- The word spokesperson
- Radio 4’s Thought for the Day
- 3-D bar-charts, pie-charts and graphs
- Corporate sponsorship of social science research for cheap publicity
- Patenting genes
- The smell of disinfectant
- The doctrine of papal infallibility
- People who judge historical figures against modern moral standards
- Customised scrollbars on web pages
- Linkrot
- Card games
- People who can’t tell the difference between margarine and butter
- Squirty cream in cans
- Pre-sliced cheese
- Breaking your leg
- Mangetout
- Baby sweetcorn
- Dictionaries with thumb-indexes
- People who say that should be thumb-indices
- Tattoos [If you want to make a statement, wear a wacky tie]
- People who try to make a statement by wearing a wacky tie
- Graffiti
- People who put advertisements under cars’ windscreen wipers
- The way the TV’s volume increases during commercial breaks
- Grown men with ponytails
- Bald men with ponytails
- Rolls Royce cars
- Medleys
- Royal correspondents
- Whoever it is who puts all the water into bacon
- People who think my driveway is a turning circle
- Young pop-stars who issue cover versions of classic songs
- Surround-sound hi-fi
- Filling in expense claim forms
- UK products that internationalised their names (Snickers™, Starburst™, Cif™, etc.)
- Theme pubs
- Filling up my car with fuel
- Decaffeinated coffee
- Unreliable builders (i.e. builders)
- Being sober when everyone else is drunk
- Standard legal disclaimers on emails
- Having your mobile phone ring when you’re sitting on the toilet
- Boxing
- Roadworks (especially roadworks with nobody doing any work in them)
- Southerners harping on about the M25
- Having mice in your house
- How’s my driving? stickers on the back of vans
- People who let their kids press the buttons for them at cashpoint machines
- People who walk in one direction and look in another
- The jelly in pork pies
- People who give considered responses to enquiries after their health
- People who take pushchairs into shops
- Colleagues whose idea of washing their mug is to leave it in the sink
- People who find bottle banks full, but leave their bottles anyway
- Deep pan pizzas
- The run-up to Christmas
- The fact that England’s Glory matches are now made in Sweden
- People who forward jokes without removing the previous forwarding details
- Collagen lips
- Music shops that file Captain Beefheart under ‘C’
- Having your clutch cable snap on a motorway approach-road roundabout
- Shampoo and cosmetics commercials that use invented ‘scientific’ jargon
- Baileys Irish Cream
- The limericks of Edward Leer (they’re shite, basically)
- Marzipan
- Halloween Special episodes of The Simpsons
- Hardback books printed on cheap paper
- Putting trousers on hangers
- People who wait for the lift to arrive before clocking off
- Thin people who say, “I need to lose weight”
- People who invent mythical genes
- Being told off by Windows for not shutting down properly after a crash
- Dogs’ pissing on your briefcase
- Body studs that aren’t in ear-lobes
- TV weather forecasters who don’t have degrees in meteorology
- Weather forecasts that give percentage chances of rain
- White rappers
- Rap music (with a capital ‘C’)
- Boy bands
- Girl bands
- Jamie Theakston
- Ben Elton
- Goatee beards
- Paper clips that think they can write letters better than me
- Moustaches (why not go the whole hog?)
- Nudists
- When a great TV programme suddenly goes To Be Continued…
- Hercule Poirot
- Hate lists