"Your Issue Here"

Sometimes it seems as though modern life contrives to irritate the hell out of one. Irritations, I think, are governed by the same sort of immutable laws that govern physics, but without smart arses like Einstein or heroes like Scotty around to challenge them.

One of the laws is that irritations become more irritating at a rate somewhere between cumulatively and exponentially - at a rate that could be dubbed the catastrophe curve. For instance, an annoying ring tone may be a minor irritation, but coming on top of a stubbed toe, a fatuous remark by a deejay, playing ‘hunt the housekeys’ and a sprint for the train, the theme tune to ‘sex and the city’ ringing out loudly could well see the owner of the mobile being pitched out the train window - no mean feat as they don’t actually open.

The second law of irritation is that things become irritating if you put them in inverted commas.

(Not, you understand, that anything in inverted commas can ever be as irritating as those people who actually PUT things in inverted commas when they are talking to you. Anyone mining punctuation near me is in great danger of my miming my own particular band of kung-fu grammar I call punchuation, not least because they are usually saying things like ‘and just because I put up a poster of Hitler in the office, apparently I’m some sort of [mime] racist [unmime]’.)

For instance, at the moment, it’s Summer. More precisely, it’s “Summer.” Summer is fishing the parasol out of the shed and using the barbeque for cooking for three weeks in a row. “Summer” is the sort of weather we are currently experiencing and is heralded by the ritual of chanting ‘are you f**king kidding!’ every time the weather forecast comes on.

The only thing more irritating than the use of inverted commas where they are not required is not using them when they should be - case in point, the front cover of glossy magazine promising celebrity photographs. This should actually read “celebrity*” “photographs**” where * is ‘some woman off a soap’ and ** means ‘fuzzy long-lens grainy images of a woman, yes, yes we’re pretty sure it’s a woman, in a bikini, well, half of a bikini - at least we’re pretty sure she’s topless, could just be the way the shadow is falling.’ Indeed, one could say that these “magazines” are shite - no inverted commas required.

The exception that proves this rule. Occasionally I enjoy leaving the office and meeting a colleague for “lunch”. Lunch means a sandwich, snack or soup. “Lunch” involves a relaxed examination of the brewers art. Oddly, I now refer to such excursions as lunch, the dropping of the inverted commas lending the impromptu trip to the pub a much needed respectability I feel.