When I started this, I didn’t think I had quite as many gripes as I (obviously) do…

• People who say things like: “it feels like a Wednesday”, when it’s Thursday. Or Tuesday. Or even worse – when it is Wednesday. Is this really the intellectual level of your conversation? These are often the same people who proclaim —
• — “but it’s really only five o’clock”, for days after the clocks have gone forward. How long can they continue to say that before it becomes irrelevant? No it isn’t five o’clock. Not here. You know where it is five o’clock? An hour to the west, that’s where. Across that imaginary line. But they never learn, because six months later when the clocks go back they say: “but it’s really still five o’clock.”
• The guy who walks up to you in the office and wishes you a Happy New Year in April. Yes, April. Are you kidding me? And then he will try to shake your hand too. Give it a rest. From now on, Happy New Year well-wishes are banned once January is over… and even that seems generous.
• Movie reboots. Stop doing it. Come up with new ideas. Not only are few of them any good, but recently re-imagined stuff like The Karate Kid or Total Recall invariably makes me feel old, because the originals reminds me of my childhood. If Hollywood ever even thinks about remaking Die Hard (the greatest action movie ever made), they will have to go through me first.
• Self-service checkouts. They were invented to decrease the time it takes for you to buy your goods and increase traffic flow, but all I see is a bunch of machines that rarely recognise the item you try to scan, and an endless procession of people fruitlessly trying to peel apart the walls of those stupid plastic bags.

A friend has asked if these niggles are sarcastic and tongue-in-cheek, to which I said:

“Sure, tongue-in-cheek, yeah. Of course.”