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.

This week alone I have experienced this with two individuals who are over 30 and you think would know better.

One was in a work-based situation and happened more than once. We’d be having a conversation and he would just casually have a feel and a scratch on his man sandwich. The first time I let him off with it because we all get an itch here and there and the weather is a bit hot and sticky right now. After the fifth or sixth time (within a week) it has resulted in me being totally repulsed by this man. His mere presence anywhere near me now aggravates me to the point where I will fake a phone call so I can dart away from him. I know this may seem a trifle unfair but he is a grown man in a professional position. When talking to people, what rational reason could he give for having a feel and a good old play around with his balls as if he’s back at home reclining in the bath and having a lovely time? There is an infuriating arrogance in someone who gives such little consideration to others that he thinks they want to see him feeling himself up.

Perhaps there are ladettes and rugby girls who actually find it funny. Maybe even some girls disturbingly find it sexy. Maybe he’s been around them all his life and I’m just a repressed uptight bitch (I’m definitely not, piggy promise). I don’t know. Just thinking about it makes me gag.

Another incident was a friend who I was enjoying a drink with last week. We were sitting on some high bar stools and he was wearing funny, unflattering long shorts. He did it slightly more discreetly than the work guy but he kept giving them a nudge and a little tug every so often. Again, it really started to irritate me that he wouldn’t think this would be offensive to me. He’s my friend and I am in no way attracted to him so to be forced to notice this particular body part over the course of an evening really put me off my pork scratchings.

So, for future reference it would be really nice if men kept their itchy and scratchy business for the bathroom, bedroom or the STD clinic. Wherever you do it please just keep it away from me and my uptight, over sensitive eyes.

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.

The weird thing is, I find it’s usually weird Bape-obsessed nerds with bad acne and trainers that look too big for their feet that are most keen to do urban handshakes. I guess they watched 8 Mile once and thought by emulating what they saw, people would think they were from the less infamous English, middle-class branch of a Detroit gang. Or maybe just not living at home with their parents and sharing a bunk bed with their 32-year-old brother.

Then, you’ve got the people who refuse to shake hands, but will instead want to touch fists with you. It’s like a game of rock-paper-scissors. I’ll go in with an open palm only to be met with a clenched fist poised for me to reciprocate. Seriously, what’s wrong with a simple handshake? Or even a high five? You can’t go wrong with a high five.

A meeting could be for any number of reasons, but one thing is almost certain: it will be a pointless affair filled with someone talking absolute bollocks from start to finish. From my own experience, one meeting out of every five thousand is of any use to anyone on this or any other planet. The rest are basically a massive waste of your time and that is time you can never get back. I know a few people who have started to refuse almost all meetings. And for good reason. Who wants to traipse across town and get some old codger’s armpit in your face on the number 55 bus? It means you are the one clambering up eight flights of stairs and flicking through a shitty 2-year-old copy of Newsweek magazine as you wait 25 minutes for your meeting partner to be free.

After all this, you sit down, engage in the usual dull small talk, listen to someone ramble on and then very quickly realise that they either want you to help them out a lot with something that is of no personal gain to you (financial or otherwise) or that they in fact had absolutely no reason for meeting you in the first place and you just sit there the whole time thinking: I have literally no idea why I’m here. What do you want from me? I try and keep myself away from meetings as much as possible. They are draining, depressing and quite frankly it’s time that could be better spent on eBbay, iChat or drinking tea.

People in meetings take themselves really seriously, no matter what they are talking about, which I find weird too. The worst example of this I can remember is when I had a meeting with a man who told me he wanted to show me this amazing new fashion magazine that was going to completely turn the world of fashion on its head. He turned up with a massive block of wood and took me through each line and curve of the wood saying that each bit of wood was a different page or section of the magazine. If this was a joke it would have been, erm, well probably a bit weird actually and not all that funny. But he was totally serious and went on for more than an hour about how incredible this magazine was and I should make sure I “didn’t miss the groovy boat” and should get involved ASAP. I quickly made my excuses and left before going back to the office and cancelling all other meetings I had planned for that week.

When you are 19 and have finally moved out of home and no longer have your mother perched at the end of you bed at 7.30 every morning asking if you had a nice time last night and “Do you want your Cheerios or Coco Pops?” moving in with friends is super duper amazing. Like probably the most exciting, most life changing thing you could ever do. You can go out every single night. You can get so drunk that you get your stomach pumped on a weekly basis and your parents need never know. You can shag every boy or girl you work with at Blockbuster Video in the comfort of your own bedroom. The list is endlessly brilliant. At this point in your life you seem to not care about the little details. Who cares if no one buys toilet paper? You can nick one of those massive rolls from the student union. Who cares if you have mice? It’s nice to have someone to talk to when you’re on mushrooms. Who cares if there is no hot running water? Bath time is something you can save for those trips back to Ma and Pa.

The problem is most people I end up living with have never got beyond this stage in life. Unless you are a warthog you will end up cleaning their dishes for them because it’s easier than nagging them to do it. It means you will have to buy endless amounts of toilet paper because you sound like a cretin asking for 40 pence from each person to pay for it. The same applies to washing up liquid, bleach, bin bags, tin foil, hand wash and milk. It means you will more often that not be the one lugging bin bags filled with oil, stinky fish and old condoms outside. It also means that sometimes you have to knock on the wall at 3am and ask them to have sex a tiny bit more quietly because you have a meeting at 8am in Croydon.

I guess people, by their very nature, are selfish. Myself included. It annoys me if I wake up and the shower is not immediately available. How dare someone else be in there when I need to be. It annoys me if I come home and someone is watching the television and it’s not something I want to watch. It annoys me if I am watching something I want to watch and then someone strolls in and starts gasbagging on the phone for 20 minutes sat right next to me.

In my ideal world I would live alone. Just me, a garden (or balcony), double glazing, a little sausage dog and a nice friendly corner shop that stocked plenty of Irn-Bru and Haribo sweets. Like a proper grown up.

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.

Here is some of the shit America has unashamedly excreted into the world for us all to endure, as well as other stuff I am holding them wholly accountable for:

• The Ku Klux Klan
• McDonald’s
• Napalm
• My Chemical Romance
• Twinkies
• Anne Coulter
• The popularisation of morbid obesity
• Frasier
• Hillary Clinton
• The phrase “my bad”
• P.O.D.
• TV evangelism
• The constant mispronunciation and misspelling of English words
• Barney the dinosaur
• Scientology
• Matt Damon

See what I mean now? One country is to blame for all of this. And this is only a mere fraction of what I can be bothered to write down. Feel free to add to the list.

I don’t know if many of them get a lot of hits – I’m sure some do from other oddballs all across the land who are genuinely interested in the birth of Lyla’s twins or whatever. But why would I need to know that Tom finally completeled his HNC in Microsoft Office and he hopes to soon be an office manager? The most ridiculous thing about these blogs is that they go into the stupidest amount of detail about every aspect of their dull lives. It is not unheard of for someone to list every meal they have every day and even show photographs. They will also take photos of every night out they’ve ever had and have a deep analysis for every friend and friend of a friend – what they are like, what they were wearing, how much less unattractive they were than them, what they drank, what their farts smelt like and so on.

The only time they will stop from lavishing fawning praise upon themselves on their hideous blogs is when they are making an emotional outburst in the hope of being offered some comforting responses. “Today I wanted to kill myself. I just couldn’t believe that Kathy on reception could be so cold towards me. She said that I was looking a bit sallow today. But then I had three Crunchies for lunch and I was happy again.”

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”?

It wouldn’t be too bad if the gig was free, but of course that would be far too painless for you. Instead, the band members usually come to some arrangement with the promoter that they will bring fifty paying people in return for being allowed to inflict their turgid drones and dull, forlorn lyrics on a room full of people. So you are forced to sacrifice a fiver in order to prolong the band’s deluded dream that there are sane people in the world who would go out of their way to listen to their pointless noise.

Surely after their eighth gig in a grotty pub with an audience consisting of the same handful of (now noticeably unenthusiastic to the point that most are talking among themselves as the band play) people that were at all of their previous shows, you would think the band would realise it’s time to call it a day. But no. They carry on until something catastrophic finally splits them apart, like the drummer contracting premature arthritis or the bass player getting a girlfriend who wants to teach him the ins and outs of tantric sex so he doesn’t have time to go to practice anymore.

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’ve got nothing against deaf people, but is there any need for this guy to be there? Shouldn’t there be a button to get rid of him? Also, what’s wrong with subtitles? The thing is, I am really easily distracted, so I just spent the whole time transfixed by this animated man in the fluorescent shirt and couldn’t pay attention to the film. I can’t overstate how unnecessarily large he was either. The people benefiting from the addition of this guy are deaf, not fucking blind!

Recently, it seems impossible to switch on the TV after midnight and find a programme worth watching without an annoying person bouncing around in the corner of the screen. I don’t see why deaf people get special treatment on late night TV anyway. What about the insomniacs? Surely they should get priority. Why don’t little fluffy bouncing cartoon sheep appear at the bottom of our screens after midnight? Or why don’t the signers dress up as sheep and do slow, hypnotic dance routines while waving their arms about? Then everyone would be happy.

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.
You see, initially, the elastic stress of the huge rusty springs and the taut mesh made it pretty hard to open them out, but eventually they would reach a point at which the springs started to act in the opener’s favour. Then you quickly had to switch from pulling the two halves downwards to suddenly trying to hold them up as the big metal legs swung down to hold the extremities of the trampoline up. One day, the big metal leg landed on my foot and completely crushed my toe. The nail came straight off and I still have a very vivid image of my pristine white sock with blood seeping through it. I had to take my sock off but the broken nail was hooted to the fibres, making the experience even more unpleasant.

As time passed, I grew a new nail – however, the new nail was deformed. Thick and pointy like a raptor’s claw. I have had it for nine years now and it still upsets me. I forget about it most of the time, but if I think about it for any reason I can feel it touching on things. This is particularly bad when I am in bed and I feel the duvet resting on my claw. As soon as I feel it, I get squirmy and have to stick my foot out of the bed so it hangs suspended in the air and I can’t feel it rubbing anymore. This is why I hate trampolines and no flashbacks of Sophie West’s flying tits will ever change my feelings.

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