I hate men scratching their bits in public

As a rule, boys in this country aren’t very well trained in manners and etiquette. That’s a given. I accept that.

But what I have a problem with is grown men who see nothing wrong with scratching their balls or putting their hands down their trousers to “sort things out” and have a good old rummage while they’re sat right in front of me having a chat.

I hate urban handshakes

God, can normal people stop doing these? If I had a penny for every time I tried to shake someone’s hand and they then manoeuvred this gesture into a weird clenched palm, elbow in the air urban greeting, I’d have about 85p right now. Listen, you’re not a “gang banger” in the Bronx. We’re English. We shake hands. Accept it. If you can’t accept it, then please don’t try and inflict your weird hand touching fetishes on other people. Shaking hands may be seen as not macho enough, but wrapping your whole hand around another man’s hand and then pulling him towards your chest is probably bordering on sexual assault in some countries.

I hate meetings

Meetings are a massive waste of time. They are basically an excuse for people to go to work late, leave work early, look busy, steal other people’s ideas, get other people to do their work for them, show off or maybe amuse themselves with the aid of a really nifty Powerpoint presentation.

I hate living with people

Living where I do, being anal about hygiene and house tidiness means I can’t turn a blind eye when faeces is smeared all over the toilet, and I prefer the fridge not to smell like it’s got a decomposing family of rats at the bottom of it. My housemates are much more laid back characters. They have a special, yet common condition called Selectively Repetitive Blindness to Disgusting Mess Disorder.

I hate America

Yep, I hate every single person, place, object and entity in America.

Okay, I don’t. But that doesn’t mean I don’t hate a great number of things that America has given to the world. And it also doesn’t mean that I won’t list a selection of these things for you now.

I hate people who blog about themselves and their boring lives

I find blogs where people solely talk about themselves and what they get up to every day weird, deluded and a bit mental. I guess people see these blogs as a sort of digital diary but isn’t the whole point of a diary that it’s for your eyes only? The appeal is in the secrecy, surely? Having a diary for the world to see must defeat the object, unless the whole thing is a desperate cry for help (which often appears to be the case).

I hate going to see my friends’ bands

There’s little worse than being emotionally blackmailed into going to see your friends play a gig. It’s bad enough watching a dreadful, sleep-inducing band. But when your friends are the members of this soporific group, unlike at any other gig, you can’t leave early for fear of offending anyone. So, for the entire night you will then have to stand with a constant forced gleeful grin on your face to give the impression you are having fun. If everyone else is dancing you may even have to sway from side to side so as not to look too conspicuous. I pride myself on my honesty but is there anything you can do when the band come at the end to ask you what you thought apart from smile falsely, nod a lot and tell them it was “really good”?

I hate the little sign language people who pop up on TV

One night last week I was attempting to watch an inane film that seemed to mostly involve Kurt Russell violently rutting Courtney Cox (don’t worry, there was no Johnson’s Baby Oil involved, it was just a very slow night elsewhere on terrestrial TV) when a bulbous man in a pink shirt popped up at the bottom of the screen and started flailing his arms about and making sign language gestures. The guy was fucking massive. He wasn’t even keeping over to the corner either – he was right over towards the middle of the screen waving his arms up and down, and generally getting in the way.

I hate trampolines

When I was at school, I opted for trampolining in PE because it meant getting to jump around aimlessly with your friends while watching Sophie West’s boobs bounce up and down quite vigorously, rather than having the boys from the year above slide tackle me in the rain. Anyway, I digress, the trampolines we had were huge things that folded up like sandwiches and had to be wheeled out by us like we were armies of ants carrying a twig, and then opened out. This opening out bit is where my problem with trampolines first arose.

I hate perfumed toilet paper

If my flatmate buys another roll of perfumed toilet paper I swear I’m going to stuff her mouth with it until she chokes. I’m allergic to perfume so every time I wipe I get nervous, like my bum is about to break out into a rash or something. Anal itching aside, what’s the point of it? Who is sniffing her ass so much that she needs to disguise its odour with chemical flowers?

I hate Agyness Deyn

I just really, really, really can’t stand her stupid face any longer. Every time I see it – which these days is at least 5,000 times a day – it makes me want to move to a remote island where fashion, neon and peroxide don’t and never will exist. Also, it is me or does her name make you think of a rare breed of cow that might be found in the Outer Hebrides, or maybe a demented, heavily wrinkled incidental member of the Royal Family?

I hate bicycle couriers

I was starting to worry that my capacity for vitriolic rage and hatred was depleting of late. Then, on my way to work today I saw something that brought it all rushing back. Bicycle couriers. These specimens are a filthy sub breed, dare I say unter menschen. They congregate in central London with their stupid bikes with mini handlebars and they drink raucously on the streets dressed like gabba ravers from Bristol or Italian lycra-clad rapists. They get drunk then do wheelies while all their decrepit friends cheer like a pride of gibbons in the Savannah. But their greatest sin is the way in which they clearly consider themselves to be a sort of SAS of postal services, an elite force. While, in fact, they are a load of dossers who realised they could make money jumping lights, bunny hopping over curbs, swearing at cars, not stopping at zebra crossings and generally being total cunts. I can’t wait for the day I get to witness one of them being slowly crushed under the wheels of a large white van after going the wrong way up a one-way street.

I hate the “And finally” section of the News

Switch on the news any day of the week and you’ll see the the same thing:

33% will be terrible events that 99.999% of us are powerless to stop.
25% will be pointless bullshit such as the McCartney divorce or the Diana investigation.
19% will be disproportionally-hyped personal interest stories, such as a kidnap or a murder.
12% will be sport.
7% will be weather.

And the remaining 4% will be a gently amusing tale to round the show off and prevent the viewer from feeling too traumatised.

I hate My Super Sweet 16

When I first came across this programme I was dumbstruck. It’s a bunch of cackling, screeching, dribbling, mentally vacant rat children with Sun-In-treated hair making horrifically extravagant demands and treating their parents, their “workers” and most other people they come across like a big bag of festering dog poo. I know the show is edited to make the kids look as bad as possible, but I still feel genuine hatred towards every single one of them.

I hate brain training

I must admit I was tempted when the Nintendo DS came out. I’d gone off games when they all started to involve getting De Niro-like into the mind of a traumatised Vietnam vet for three days before you were allowed the knife you needed to stab your way out a 3D jungle prison camp. But this new machine looked like fun, and was a pretty nice bit of product design.

When I finally did get to test a friend’s, it was for the greater part of a week after a big break up. I spent the whole time sat on a couch in a house in Sydney drinking chocolate milk and whisky, playing Advance Wars until I started dreaming in square arrangements of neon Panzer divisions. At the end of the week, I gave it back, and resolved to get on with life.

I hate the Animals in War Memorial

This is a monument on Park Lane to animals killed in war. I have nothing against animals but I can’t help but be irked by this. Can you even imagine how much money it cost to construct this vapid pile of filth?

I hate hand dryers

I really hate hand dryers. This is no common or garden hatred. This is seething, seeing red, want-to-rip-my-hair-out-at-the-sheer-audacity-to -even-exist hatred. If I walk into a bathroom and see one on the wall it makes me wish I had a nice weighty flat-head shovel so I could lever the fucking thing right off like I was ripping a rusty old nail out of a rotten piece of wood. Conversely, if I see one of those big roller-wipe-your-hands-dry things I dance a jig of joy right there on the spot like Michael Flatley in the middle of a chronic bout of haemorrhoids he happened to contract while walking bare foot over hot coals.

I hate airports

Nowadays, travelling via an airport to anywhere is a pain in the arse. It’s basically a total waste of time (if you ignore the minor fact that getting to somewhere really, really far away by any other means of transport would take 3-4 weeks).

There are myriad reasons I have grown to hate airports. Firstly, I always fall into the trap of checking in my luggage and then saying to myself, “Hmmm… I’m thirsty. I’ll go and buy a nice, refreshing drink at that handy newsagents over there.” After paying £3.50 for a bottle of water, I breeze along to the next stage of the airport dance – the security check-in for your hand luggage. And what do I find? I’m not allowed to bring my water through with me. Fucking weasels. Why have a shop selling a fine selection of thirst-quenching beverages that are only of use if you are so thirsty you want to pour the entire thing down your gullet in world record time?