List of HATE

I've been meaning to start this for some time, despite it sounding like an incredibly negative thing to do. Actually, I think this is going to be a cathartic experience and, through expressing my hates in the open they'll be highlighted in all their ridiculousness and therefore belittled.

First, a word or two about the nature of this hate list:

This isn't serious. I'm not going to be listing dark and disturbing thoughts here. Nor am I going to go into the things that make me deeply angry. There will be no ranting about my loathing of pretension, vanity, selifishness, self-absorption, blind opinion, judgement, Big Brother ... nay! This will be a list of all the things I find frustrating, distressing, irksome, in an everyday fashion. You know - traffic lights changing to red just as you get there, that sort of thing.

I'm not going to sit down in one fell swoop and list all my hates. Not only would that be emotionally exhausting and put me in the world's foulest mood for a month, but I'd be guaranteed to think of twenty five other, different and more irksome things the very next day and have to go back and change the list. No, this will be an ongoing notation of life's minor miseries, and I encourage anyone with a small, yet potent, irk to note them here and thus expend some frustrated energy.

I shall kick off proceedings with Hate Number 1.

1) Getting changed after the gym. There is simply nothing good about it. You start out hot and sweaty. You have a shower. You then spend the next 1o minutes returning to the same hot and sweaty state as you commenced the process, owing to the overheated nature of gym changing rooms, the tininess of the cubicles, or, if you're bold enough to use the open communal bit, the contortions you inevitably have to perform behind a concealing towel because some mother has brought her 6 year old boy child in and he's gawking at you like he's never seen an arse that big in his life. (To be fair, he probably hasn't). You also never - NEVER - manage to leave with dry socks. The gym floor is always wet thanks to swimmers (of which I am often one) and no matter how hard you try, you can't avoid putting your dry, cosy foot into a skanky puddle. By the time you've left the gym you wish to God you'd just gone home in a dog-sweat and showered there.

That's number 1. More - o so many more - will follow.