I was watching an episode of ‘Kirstie and Phil’s Love It or List It’. Don’t judge me. It’s good. It’s no ‘George Clarke’s Old House, New Home’, but it’s good.

In case you’ve never seen it, Kirstie and Phil meet with a couple who feel like their home isn’t working for them. And then some stuff goes on that doesn’t quite make sense, where Kirstie helps them renovate their home, while Phil really eggs them on to move and shows them other houses.

I’d been particularly enticed by this episode as the synopsis on Sky described it as a tearjerker. And I thought – oh, yes please! I love my tears being jerked. I was on the sofa, drinking peppermint tea, eagerly waiting for some tragedy, but it just wasn’t coming.

And then at one point Kirstie said something and the homeowner woman was crying and Kirstie was crying and I looked to my side and my not-husband Tom was crying. Actual tears were falling down his face. But my tears weren’t being jerked.

As far as I could see, all that had happened was Kirstie had said, “You want to feel proud of your house, don’t you, Julie? You’ve always wanted to feel proud of your house.” And Julie said yes. Then Kirstie was crying and Julie was crying and Tom was crying and my Sky synopsis was telling me to cry and I felt nothing.

All I could think was, why do you want to feel proud of your house? All I want is to feel 50% less ashamed about how dirty and run-down it is. Feeling proud of my house is about number 89 on my list of things I want to feel proud of, below the font I use, how many keys I have in my house that I don’t know what they open and my technique for drying bed linen.

Like an alien trying to understand the Homo sapien, I asked Tom what had made him cry. I wanted to learn how to feel sad about a woman who wants to feel proud of her house. He said, “Well, she’d just always wanted to feel proud of her house but never had and now she can.” I was still dead inside.

It was just me, Kirstie, Julie and Tom involved, but I felt like another species. A not entirely unfamiliar feeling. I want to move on now to Princess Diana’s funeral, even though that’s quite the shift from ‘Kirstie and Phil’s Love It or List It’. Still, here it is.

The day of her funeral, I went to the shops to buy something. I can’t remember what was so essential that I was prepared to miss the goodbye to our Queen of Hearts. But what I do remember was that the shops were all empty because everybody was watching the funeral on the television. The lady who served me was crying about Diana throughout our transaction. And because I’m deeply flawed and dead inside, I just thought, ‘But you don’t know her.’ I’m assuming she didn’t. I don’t think Princess Diana had many friends who were shop assistants in Southend-on-Sea.

On the day she died, I was in France. I was backpacking around Europe, but by coach, not train. An Australian woman got on the coach very early that morning and broke the news. I definitely felt shocked and sad when I heard it. I’m not heartless. I felt sad for her family and sad that she was so young.

Later that day, I got talking to someone French and when they found out I was British, they said, “Oh, I’m so sorry for your loss.”

I didn’t know how to respond. So I really milked it and looked sad and solemnly thanked them. But it had been a good few hours since I’d heard the news and I was back to feeling nothing again.

I’m not entirely devoid of emotion though. Give me someone at the supermarket checkout buying too many of one thing, and I’m in bits. Eight packets of Jacobs Cream Crackers, my heart clenches with pain. Fifteen tins of Heinz Tomato Soup, I’m welling up. It’s something about them liking one thing so much.

I saw an old lady once buying three huge whole roast-in-the-bag ducks. I was a wreck. I was picturing her trying and failing to squash two of them into the little freezer compartment of her fridge. And then putting them in a bath with ice cubes and turning the heating off for the next two months. My tears were very nearly jerked. But Kirstie and Phil are never going to get me.

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Hello! I’m on annual leave this week, so here’s one from the ancient archive (2023).

Modern life. I can’t get enough of it. Sometimes I like to read a book set in pre-mobile phone times to remind me of the horrors of the past and enhance my gratitude for the now. But there are three things that spoil it. I’ve tried not to let them irritate me. But it’s like trying to ignore a tennis ball in your mouth. (I’ve never had a tennis ball in my mouth, but I’m sure it wouldn’t be something you’d ever get used to.) Here they are.

1. Arty estate agent photographers

Estate agents get a bad press. They’re called untrustworthy, duplicitous and unreliable. But there’s a far greater crime being committed in the property world. And that is estate agent photographers trying to be arty with their photos. They have one job. One job! To give prospective buyers and renters an idea of what a home looks like. And I don’t care that they use trickery to suggest larger, brighter spaces. Even though it’s pointless trickery, as a viewing will soon reveal the minuscule, murky truth.

What I do care about as I scroll through images of the living room, bedrooms and kitchen are shots like this:

I believe they are called lifestyle shots. The only lifestyle I’m interested in of a home seller is whether their hobbies are psychopathic murders and hiding bodies in the wall cavities. If that’s the case, fine. Show me the blood stains and the patched-up wall and the dank basement with ropes, chains and a pickaxe. Anything else, I’m not interested.

Look at this one.

I’m just thinking  - yes, nice wireless, but is it included in the house? No, it is not, so why are you showing it to me?

Yes, there are some nice knickknacks here. But will the fixtures and fittings list say radiators, doorbell, fridge, washing machine, all blinds and little fox ornament? No.

It’s very often a bowl of fruit or freshly cut flowers in a vase. That won’t even be there next month, let alone when I move in.

I don’t know why it irritates me so much. Perhaps because these arty shots are not just for multi-million-pound houses. They’re mostly for three-bed terraces in the suburbs. Who are you trying to fool? Not me! You’re just selling bricks and mortar.

But despite my annoyance, I am quite tempted to put my flat on the market just to see how an estate agent photographer would try and evoke my lifestyle in their shots. Because I’m only imagining a solitary chair in a room and an overflowing laundry basket.

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2. Amazon Q&As

When you’re looking at something on Amazon, you get the product description and the reviews and also the Q&As. These are the things that other people have asked about the item.

But they are not answered by the retailers. By anyone with any expertise in the product. They are answered by other shoppers. You might think this would get you a more honest response from someone who owns and has used the product. Unfortunately, it is just as likely to get you something like this.

Question: Which dimension is the height of this microwave? 44, 25.8 or 35.9?

Answer: Not sure, my tape measure is not that good.

I have two further questions. Why did you answer this if you didn’t know the answer? And how can a tape measure be not that good?

For the same microwave, here’s another one:

Question: How is the interior finished?

Answer: Sorry, I can't answer this question. I bought it as a housewarming gift for my granddaughter who lives almost 300 miles from me so I haven't seen it.. All I know is she is delighted with it and said she couldn't have picked a better one.

I mean, I’m not totally cold-hearted about this. I like the gratitude of the granddaughter. But why did you answer the question if you didn’t know the answer?

This happens much more than you imagine. Although if I’d been asked to imagine it before ever seeing it, I would’ve said never.

3. The diva-like behaviour of all the windows on my Mac

Imagine you’re at your computer. You’re staring at your screen. (I also need you to imagine that it’s a Mac as I’m pretty sure PCs don’t do this as they’re not as showy.) Let’s say there is a Word document on the screen. You don’t need this Word document for the time being. So you decide to minimise it. You click the little yellow circle in the top corner. That button that says - get out of my sight, but don’t go away completely. And what happens next?

Okay, you can stop imagining; here’s a video I made of it.

It does this whole over-the-top genie back-in-the-bottle thing. I don’t need to see your journey, mate. Stop trying to hog the screen for a bit longer. Just disappear. It’s being histrionic and dramatic about it. It doesn’t like that it’s been minimised, so it flounces off. I don’t like how it comes back either.  It’s still doing the genie in a bottle thing, but the genie is coming out. Just be there and don’t be there. Stop acting up.

And then I discovered I could stop it from acting up. In the course of writing this, I found you can change the settings in a place I didn’t even know existed, from genie effect to scale effect. Now every window just disappears normally in a way that I feel it’s saying, ‘Okay, no problem, let me know when I can be of service again.’ And then comes back with a, ‘Reporting for duty, ma’am.’ It’s like going from working with Joan Crawford to that butler from Remains of the Day.

I suppose I’ve only now got two irritations of modern life. That’s good. And even with these two, I may well be alone in my vexation. Some might find them charming. Maybe even sweet in the case of the Amazon answers. So I’m very willing to accept that it’s entirely my failure.

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I was on a long walk with my not-husband Tom and our dog. When I say long, I mean several hours. Our son was with his granny and we were making the most of our childfree time by doing all the nice things that he won’t allow. We’d already covered the sleeping and thinking, so now it was the kind of long walk he refuses to go on despite having the energy levels of a coked-up Duracell bunny.

Somewhere during the third hour, while on a shady woodland path, the conversation turned to people who take on their partner’s hobbies. Stuff like:

“I just don’t know if Sandy/Betty/Jan would be doing bouldering/geocaching/soap carving if her husband wasn’t so into bouldering/geocaching/soap carving.”

Or

“Is trailrunning/taxidermy/burlesque really Danny/Sonny/Patty’s thing, or is it just that their girlfriend likes it?”

We were questioning whether this is their true identity that they’ve finally uncovered or if they are just shaping themselves to fit into their partner’s preferred hole.

I thought about it for a while and then realised that I do this all the time. Although not with my partner, but with my son.

As a child, I’d quite enjoyed completing sticker books. I’d had the Mary Kay one, which was drawings of a girl and her friends. It was popular in the Eighties and feels really weird now, as they wore a cross between seventies and Edwardian clothes. So some would be in bonnets, aprons and flouncy dresses and others in dungarees or flares.

I also collected stickers with stills from the film Annie. It was quite addictive and felt like some stickers were really rare, and you’d have to buy thousands of packets to complete the book.

So I’d had a previous interest in collecting this kind of stuff, but I felt no excitement or nostalgia when my son started wanting to collect Match Attax football cards.

Firstly, I was a bit worried about having to remortgage and release some equity in order to pay for them. (That’s a joke, obviously. There’s no way my mortgage provider would let me remortgage.)

And secondly, I had zero interest in football outside of the big international tournaments and the time it was claimed that Wayne Rooney went with a sex worker called Ye Aulde Slapper at Diva’s massage parlour in Liverpool.

But I started buying him a few packs. And then something really weird happened. I became nearly as obsessed as my son with these football cards.

There are the standard football player cards, but also special versions of these, which might be metallic and shiny, or in a different shape like a shield. They are much more rare and it is such an incredible thrill when one of these appears in a pack.

My son once got what is called a ‘god pack’, where every card is special. There were shields, 100 Clubs, black edges. I don’t know how to explain how rare these are. Basically nobody gets them. And I honestly thought I was going to faint.

And let me just remind you, I don’t even like football.

The Match Attax folders have clear plastic pages and pockets on each side to insert your cards. So they are way better than stickers. Stickers you stick in the book and that’s it. With the cards, you can continually rearrange them. I love it when my son suggests a different way of organising them. Which is strange, as I have no interest or desire to organise the clutter of my own home.

One morning my son asked if I could help him make little stands for his ten favourite cards so they could be on display. “Yes, I can!” I replied at 7am. I painstakingly made little cardboard stands and then found myself saying, “Perhaps I could put a shelf up in your bedroom to put them on.”

I recently gave a load of books away as I couldn’t be bothered to put up a shelf to store them. Reading is my number one hobby. What has happened to me?

The most disturbing point came when my son wanted to watch a video on YouTube, which was an hour of a fully grown man opening one hundred packets of Match Attax cards. I said, “Oh, come on now, you’re not watching this. This is terrible.“

Two minutes later I was gripped. I watched the whole thing. Who am I? All I can say is that, unfortunately, I think I’ve uncovered my true identity, my true passion. And I’m also looking for an extra job so I can remortgage to pay for thousands of football cards.

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We were walking through one of those small, pretty Spanish squares with a church on one side when I spotted it. The hotel that I was going to book but didn’t.

The backstory of any holiday booking I make is one of hours of gruelling, painstaking research. After which I pick the very first place I looked at. But by that point, I’ve read up to a hundred reviews.

“That was the hotel I rejected, as the reviews said the church bells rang every fifteen minutes, day and night.”

We were walking back from the beach and it was slightly uphill. My not-husband Tom didn’t even glance back at me. His shoulders slumped a little, though, as he knew this would not be the first time I mentioned it.

I can’t stop myself. I have to point out all my rejected accommodations and the reasons they didn’t make the grade. It’s like I’m spotting exes and listing their shortcomings. Which would probably be slightly more interesting.

It got to the stage where I noticed Tom purposely choosing a different route back from the beach. The last time we found ourselves going past, he said rather tersely, “I can’t help noticing those bells have not rung once while we’ve been here.” Which was true.

This is just one of four ways (minimum) that I’m awful on holiday.

Here’s the second. My taste in everything goes totally out of the window. I’ll walk past shops selling floaty shirts and dresses, which are not my thing at all, and think - Hmm… Should I?

I’m looking at toe rings, shell necklaces, bracelets with letters which spell out the word ‘friend’. At one point I heard this sentence in my head – ‘Oh, that’s a nice ashtray.’ I do not smoke. Nor does anyone I know.

If I’m ever rich, I’ll have to put limits on my credit cards before I go away.

Number three. I love crisps. And what’s more exciting than holiday crisps? I don’t think this is like saying I love holiday egg and chips. As you get lots of different flavours. And I mostly mean you get paprika flavour, which used to be a solely Mediterranean thing. That’s changing now, but I wouldn’t eat paprika crisps in the dreary old UK. They are holiday crisps. I also really like barbecue ones on holiday but not at home.

I tried to find barbecue crisps abroad one year, but I couldn’t see the word barbecue or BBQ anywhere. I did, however, see some in a black packet and we all know that this is barbecue. It’s a rule much stricter than the cheese and onion/salt and vinegar colours debacle at home.

These black packet crisps also looked really posh, which I’m basing on the fact that they had the word ‘premium’ in big letters on the front. They also had a picture of a black bottle on the front to illustrate the flavour, which was very mysterious and intriguing. I couldn’t find any words for the flavour but got them anyway. As they must be barbecue.

Later I settled into a white plastic patio chair with a glass of wine and my pre-dinner black crisps snack. I put one in my mouth and it was a flavour I had never experienced before and I cannot say that it was nice.

I had a few more to be sure and then curiosity got the better of me. I put my glasses on and studied the back of the packet. And discovered that they were the worst crisp flavour in existence. Cockles. I fell to the floor in horror.

Food-wise, things got much better on a day trip to Barcelona. We’d done an open-top bus tour as I love an open-top bus tour. I’ll do one anywhere, including Southend-on-Sea, even though you could strongly argue that the only point of interest on the seven-mile route is the pier.

We then strolled around some lovely little back streets and found a sweet little tapas restaurant for dinner. It was full of locals, so we were very pleased with ourselves. I then ordered the best meal of my life. A seven tomato salad and gazpacho. This is basically my dream meal, as I love tomatoes and so I was very excited. But then something truly awful happened. When the waitress brought my gazpacho, it looked so good that before I could stop myself, I went, “Yummy yummy”. So basically, I can’t go on holiday ever again.

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Five years ago I was asked to do a talk at my old secondary school. The painful build-up is here. But we’re now at the night before and I’ve noticed the headmaster has tweeted about my impending moment of glory. And also about the other speaker.

I’d been told it was a headteacher of a local primary school, who’d left more recently than me. And now I have a name that I can background check beyond even what an M15 vetting officer would do.

It does not go well. Being asked to do a speech at your old school should make you feel successful, but I’ve never felt more like a failure and a waste of space compared to this other speaker. Not content with just being a headteacher, she does loads of stuff for the community and works in the areas of diversity and unconscious bias. And still found the time to have three children.

I’m panicking now. A single-celled organism feels more accomplished than me. But I finish writing my speech and I’m quite pleased I’ve managed to get in the words incontinent, prison and strippergram.

The next morning I drive to my school. It’s a weird journey. I keep thinking - I know what my future is now. Like I was going to be able to tell 18-year-old me when I arrived.

She’s not there, but I do get a tour of the school, which I’d been very excited about but soon become genuinely furious that it isn’t exactly as I remember it. I realise that I didn’t want a tour of my school; I want to time travel back to the early 90s. Why must things change? I feel this about almost everything (Opal Fruits, Marathon bars, the WHSmiths logo) until I remember stuff like women’s rights and decent coffee.

I’m then taken to the headmaster’s office. He’s lovely and I meet my big rival, the other speaker, and she’s also lovely. It’s all lovely until I discover that my A-level history teacher, Mr Hayton, still works there. I loved Mr Hayton! We were a small class and he was really young; it was his first year of teaching. We got on so well and all went to the pub with him on the last day of school.

The headmaster, seeing my enthusiasm, says he’ll get him to come down. I cannot wait for the possibly tearful reunion. I will bring back so many memories for him! His first class! He’s probably been following all our careers. Maybe it was even him who added me to the school Wikipedia page.

I can tell from the moment he walks into the office that he has no idea who I am. I can’t believe I thought that after 28 years and thousands of pupils that he’d still remember me. It’s incredibly awkward.

I’m glad to move into the hall for the big speech. Until I walk onto the stage and see my audience for the first time. I have dramatically misjudged the tone and content of my speech.

I’d written for the student I was then. But this school has changed a lot over the years. It’s a grammar school, which is free but you have to pass an exam at eleven to get in. And the catchment area has hugely increased since I was there. I would never get in if I was eleven now. These are the brightest kids of the whole of Essex and East London. They have excelled academically. They’re not wasting their zillions of brain cells thinking about boys and makeup and which Thunderbird fortified wine is better, the blue or the red.

The headteacher speaker goes first, which is good as it gives me more time to panic. She is someone who is energised by public speaking. She comes alive on stage. There are no notes; she just speaks from the heart. There are dramatic pauses, inspiring stories and profound observations.

And then there’s me. Who seems to shrink during public speaking. I feel myself getting smaller and smaller with every word, especially incontinent, prison and strippergram.

They’d asked me to talk a bit about my radio career. And what people usually want to know is what celebrities I’ve met and what they were like. So I find myself listing famous people and, at best, it was like someone their mum’s age trying to look cool, and at worst, it was really ugly bragging.

I finish my speech by mentioning their exams and the teacher invigilator game. I’ve heard about this from many teachers. To get through the monotony of monitoring the exams, they pick a topic, like most likely to end up in prison, and then a teacher has to walk up to and stand by the person they think fits it best.

When my talk was over, the teacher hosting the event said quite tersely, “I can assure you, we don’t play the invigilator game here.”

So looks like I won’t be invited back again. Unless it’s another 28 years when everyone has left. I think it will take me that long to get over it.

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Five years ago, I got the email that I had, without realising, been waiting for my whole adult life. It was from my old secondary school asking me to come and do a speech for the sixth form.

Here’s what followed in my brain:

Firstly, pure joy. Surely one definition of success is being asked to return to speak at your own school. I’ve made it!

Then it started to feel weird that it had come at a time when success-wise it could be argued that I was in something of a trough. That’s not to say that peaks weren’t a-coming. The biggest peaks of all. I like to live my life in blind optimism. But maybe I could have expected this email the decade before, when I worked in radio and had won an award, for example.

So then I started thinking about what a crippling disappointment I would be to the students. I’m a nobody. A nothing. I looked at a list of my school’s notable alumni on Wikipedia to see who I was a poor substitute for. The Bootstrap Cook Jack Monroe, Jane Root, controller of BBC2 and Natalie Emmanuel from Hollyoaks.

Even my own dad, when I told him about this talk, said, “Oh, how did you find out about that?” Like I’d won a competition to do it.

It started to feel ridiculous that I’d been asked. Why me? I’ve got school friends who are doctors, partners in law firms, psychologists and teachers. My friend Steph designed Wembley Stadium. Kind of. In that she once made a prop for a TV show of an architect’s model of a stadium and did one with a big arch. A short time later they unveiled the new Wembley stadium. With a big arch. I’m not successful. I haven’t even got a pension.

And then I thought about how long ago I left the school. I was there from 1986 to 1993. So this would be like someone coming to give me a talk in sixth form, who’d attended between 1958 and 1965. They would have seemed like the oldest person alive. I would have thought, “Why have they got this old fuddy duddy in?” Because we said words like fuddy duddy in 1993.

A memory of a radio show feature started to come back to me. I had been challenged to get something named after me and I decided to go for the newly built wing of my old secondary school.

I rang them up and suggested to the business manager that it be called the Annabel Port Wing. Their response was, “Sorry to sound a bit mercenary, but of what benefit is this to us?”

I was forced to sink very low and said in desperation, “But I’m Annabel Port. I’m on the school Wikipedia page.”

“Right, that’s not something I go on,” he told me.

“You should! I’m there. And a girl from Hollyoaks.”

“Oh yes,” he said, perking up considerably. “Natalie Emmanuelle. I do know her.”

I did not succeed in this challenge.

Suddenly, a new emotion emerged. Annoyance. There were only eight people on the notable past pupils on Wikipedia. Why hadn’t they asked me to do a speech sooner? I’d left 28 years ago! I went from feeling embarrassed that they’d asked someone so lowly to feeling outraged that it took them so long.

It was at this point that I got another email from the school, which mentioned there would be two of us doing a speech. Me and another past pupil, who is the head teacher of a local primary school, but I wouldn’t know her as she left much more recently. Why did she get fast-tracked? And am I actually the backup speaker in case she drops out?

Considering I was only asked four weeks before the event, which is kind of short notice, I was also now wondering if someone backed out and I was a last-minute desperate replacement.

Anyway, of course I said yes to doing it. Figuring that I’d panic about it closer to the time. And, in a cliffhanger more thrilling than who shot J.R., I’ll tell you about the car crash of a speech next week.

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When I look back on my pre-teen self, I think – who were you, where did you go and could you come back, please?

As a child, my parents encouraged me to do lots of drama, very possibly as an outlet for my histrionic and attention-seeking behaviour. It was not unusual for me to enter the living room and pretend to die. And then have to get up and leave when no comment was made on my terrible and very dramatic demise.

From my first production of Sleeping Beauty, I was hooked. And I wasn’t going to sit around waiting for the drama group to do another. That would be a whole year away. So I wrote my own play. Fairly ambitious for an eleven-year-old, although I didn’t waste time inventing a whole new plot and characters. I wrote what I called ‘The Modern Version of Cinderella.’

Admittedly, the only thing that made it modern was that Cinderella wore trainers instead of satin slippers and it was a disco, not a ball. It still had Cinderella slaving away for her evil stepsisters until she gets to marry a rich man, with no other options open to her.

I wasn’t just content with writing it. This wasn’t enough. I now wanted to put the play on. So with some chutzpah that has long since entirely left me without leaving even the slightest trace, I did. I arranged for it to be performed at my primary school with my fellow pupils. I cast it, gave them all scripts and then every lunchtime for a few weeks I directed the rehearsals.

This feels such a mammoth task now. Getting everyone together, telling them what to do, sorting out costumes and props and scenery. I was basically the primary school Trevor Nunn.

So when it came to the end-of-year school tradition for the oldest class, 4^th year juniors, to create their own assembly, everyone looked to me to take charge. Along with Susie Hurley, as she was the cleverest girl in the class and so could do anything.

Usually these pupil assemblies tackled themes like helping the elderly and stranger danger. But at the time, there was a huge storyline in the children’s TV drama, Grange Hill. Zammo had become a heroin addict (this feels weirdly gritty now) and the whole cast had recorded an anti-drugs single called ‘Just Say No’, which got to number five in the charts.

It was at the forefront of our minds. When we closed our eyes, all we could see was Zammo’s girlfriend Jackie finding his secret stash hidden in his calculator battery compartment and throwing it on the floor. Then him trying to lick it up. It was massive.

So we decided to do our assembly on the dangers of drugs. Even though we didn’t really know anything about drugs. This was evident throughout, but especially in a song we wrote and performed with the lyrics, “My name’s drugs, I’m drugs the pill, I can kill, I’m drugs the pill.”

It was also around the time that it had been in the news that Boy George was addicted to heroin, so we also made this announcement to a school full of Culture Club fans:

“It’s recently been announced that Boy George is addicted to drugs. Sadly, he has just another two weeks to live.”

Where did we get that from? He’s still alive 40 years later. We were like sensationalist tabloid news editors.

The only other person we could think of who was affected by drugs was Elvis Presley and this was my starring role. I came on in my school uniform, sang the opening line to Blue Suede Shoes while doing some Elvis-style dancing. Then I stopped, stood very still, looked down sadly, then looked up and said to an audience of stunned five-to ten-year-olds, “I was the king of Rock and Rock. Not after I took drugs; I was just another ordinary loser.”

Which was also not true. He was still Elvis. As far from an ordinary loser as you can get, really.

But it was all a big hit with the kids. And also my big peak. My theatrical career plummeted downhill after that. What happened to all that get-up-and-go?

Give me these challenges now and I’d panic and then delegate. I’d never have the confidence for any of it. I miss the complete absence of fear, doubt and imposter syndrome.

But that gutsy eleven-year-old did do me a big favour, though. As I never ended up getting addicted to heroin, so that assembly really worked.

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I once witnessed a very heated argument on the London Underground between a woman and a man whose legs she believed were too widespread. The moment she sat down next to him, she immediately said, “Oh no. No, no, no. You’re going to have to close those.”

While his legs were definitely akimbo, they were not obscenely so and he resisted closure, claiming they were a perfectly normal distance apart and he was actually physically unable to get them any closer.

This riled her further, perhaps because it didn’t seem entirely true, and she shouted at him to close them now.

Obviously I said nothing and just tried to pretend I wasn’t watching. But I had a quiet respect for her. It felt like a culmination of years of making herself smaller, sucking herself up like the contents of a vacuum bag, and she’d finally had enough.

This isn’t the most audacious thing I’ve seen on the tube though. I was travelling in the morning rush hour and the carriage was very tightly packed. Every inch of standing space was taken. I was one of the lucky ones with a seat. It was the middle of the row.

As we approached a stop, my neighbour stood to get off. There was now a seat free, which, by every rule, belongs to the closest standing person.

But before this could happen, a man standing at least five people away, if not more, threw his bag over the top of their heads onto the empty seat, effectively bagsying it. He then pushed through, picked up his bag and sat down. Nobody said a word. I think we were all too shocked. I longed for leg-spread lady to be there. If she had been, the fallout would’ve been so great there’d now be a Netflix documentary.

Here’s the very worst thing I’ve seen on public transport though. And sadly I was the disgusting perpetrator.

It was the number 25 bus, which at the time had three different nicknames.

1. The Essex Express as it goes from Central London to Ilford.

2. The bendy bus, as it was one of those long ones with a bendy middle and lots of doors.

3. The free bus, as you could enter it from the middle or rear doors and be trusted to tap your payment card on a reader inside. As it turned out, nobody could be trusted to do this, which Transport for London eventually cottoned on to and held regular ticket inspections before eventually axing all these types of bus.

Anyway, I’d got on the middle of the bus and it was very busy with all those free riders. Every seat was taken. But I’d come aboard at the same time as a very elderly, very frail woman and nobody was offering her a seat. This made me really angry.

So I singled out the person seated closest to where the frail lady was struggling to stand. It was a girl in her twenties, and I gave her a look which could have only meant one thing. You are a disgusting waste of space of a human being and deserve to die.

My death stare worked. She looked at me, then at the old lady and stood up. It was only then that I noticed she was about seven months pregnant.

The old lady didn’t seem to register this and took her seat. What could I do now? Use my powerful death stare on the old lady until she gave the seat back? I was terrified of using it on anyone else for fear they’d stand up to reveal polio callipers, a gunshot wound or that they were in the early stages of childbirth. So I just stared at the floor and said nothing. And just wished leg-spread lady was there to sort it all out.

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A few years ago, I stayed in a holiday home dominated by an anachronistic beast, which bellowed at me every half hour throughout the night. If it were a human, there would have been a major intervention, but because it was a grandfather clock, chiming its head off all night, I was expected to put up with it.

By the morning, I had an incredibly intense deep hatred of not just grandfather clocks, but all clocks and also time in general.

It wasn’t just one mournful chime every 30 minutes. On every half past, it did a chime for every hour. Which wasn’t so bad with the one at 1:30am, but at 11:30pm I was ready to rip out the pendulum and use it to perforate my eardrums so I’d never have to hear a chime again.

It was torturous, especially as surely you should indicate the hour on the hour.

I don’t understand why anyone would need to know the time throughout the entire night. And have such an urgent need that they had to be woken every single half hour.

I lay there in an unfamiliar bed, becoming increasingly enraged that grandfather clocks still exist in the 21^st century. It’s insanity. The time is so prevalent all around us now that usually the only body part I have to move to find out the time is my eyes. I calculated that in my home there are nine devices which display the time and none of them are clocks.

What we really don’t need now is a big towering beast with a big ‘look at what’s in my pants’ swinging pendulum shouting the time at me every 30 minutes for 24 hours a day.

I had a lot of time to ruminate on grandfather clocks during that long night. Just the name itself is a fingernail down the blackboard of my soul. What other household items have a familial name included? None. There is no Auntie Toaster. Nephew occasional table. First cousin once removed bellows.

These clocks with gigantism got their name after an American songwriter wrote a song called ‘My Grandfather’s Clock.’ He’d been staying at a hotel in County Durham and asked about a particular kind of tower clock they had. It hasn’t been noted exactly what he said, but I’m going to presume it was, “What the hell is this monstrosity that keeps me awake all night?”

He was told how the clock had had two owners. After the first owner died, the clock became inaccurate and when the second owner died, the clock stopped working altogether. Which says to me they are sentient. I knew it! They know they are torturing us. I would not be surprised if it turns out they are aliens in disguise trying to send us all mad through lack of sleep to make it easier for them to colonise Earth.

When morning finally came in this holiday home, and knowing I had nine more nights left, I told my boyfriend Tom that because of this clock I was going to have to go home.

He said, “Yes, it kept me up too, but you can turn the chimes off.”

All I wanted to do right then was marry Tom and then divorce him and have on an official document for all eternity that it was because he didn’t turn off the grandfather clock when he could have done and it woke me up every half hour all night.

What blows my mind most is that if it can be turned off and presumably has been at one point unless everyone is insane, who the hell turned it back on again?

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My dog, Rusty Scruff the Teddy Bear King He’s Firm But Fair, is scared of massive dogs. This is fair enough, as I think everyone is scared of massive dogs, apart from owners of massive dogs and they probably should be.

I’m walking him at a park near my parents’ home with my son and nephew. Nobody else is there.

Rusty is off the lead, sniffing around and the boys are playing football, when I become aware that a man has come in with one of the biggest, most terrifying dogs I have ever seen. I refuse to believe that a lead and collar exist that could restrain it. Even metal chains would just pop. I immediately put Rusty on the lead as he’ll feel safer that way. I think. I haven’t asked him. And actually thinking about it now, he probably felt less safe as he can now only run away at my speed.

I feel a lot better when the man and giant dog go into an enclosed area with two tennis courts. To get in, you book online and then get a code for the keypad on the gate.

The lock must be broken, though, as he walks straight in. The beast is now off the lead, but at least he’s enclosed. He’s not playing tennis, sadly. But he’s bounding around aggressively and barking loudly at my dog.

The man says what they always say in this situation: “Don’t worry, he’s just a puppy. He’s excited by the football.” No, he wants to eat Rusty, then my son, then my nephew and then me. Don’t lie. But he’s enclosed within a high wire fence, so we carry on with what we’re doing and then at some point they leave.

My son now wants to go into the tennis courts, as he’s seen that they’re open. And on entering, we discover the biggest dog poo I have ever seen, which the dog has clearly just done. I won’t go into too much detail for fear you may never be able to eat again, but it wasn’t tidy. And it wasn’t firm. It was a splat bigger than my face.

I have some dog poo bags with me, but they were entirely inadequate for the job. I’m not sure even a shovel, a bin bag and a pressure washer would be adequate for the job. There’s no way I’m touching it. I don’t want to be anywhere near it, so I get out and eventually my son does too and goes back to playing football.

Fifteen minutes later, bad dog poo man is back. With a small-ish bright blue plastic bag in his hand. The type you get when you go to the corner shop for a few bits. I don’t see how it’s going to tackle this mess, but I’m relieved that he’s a good citizen and trying.

He goes over to the tennis courts, but there seems to be a problem. He shouts over to us, “Did one of you close this door?”

What quickly emerges is that the lock was never broken. He’d got in as the gate was open and then left it ajar for himself to come back. But then my son had closed it. It is now locked; he can’t get back in, and it is our fault.

I find myself saying I could maybe book a court to get the code. He seems to think this is a great idea, so I go on my phone. But it’s £5 plus a £1 booking fee. £6! I don’t want to pay £6, but should I?

As he shouldn’t have been in there with his dog in the first place. And he shouldn’t have let his dog poo in there. And he should have had a dog poo bag and probably also a shovel and a pressure washer with him. And he should’ve said, “I’m coming back. Don’t close the door.”

That’s a lot of shoulds.

All this is going through my mind. And I’m very tight. Why can’t he pay it?

So I say weakly, “Oh, it’s £6.”

“Mmm,” is his only response.

After a long silence, he says, “I don’t want to get fined £1000.” I can’t see any cameras, so I feel like he’s getting a bit dramatic now.

Sensing my unease and that he’s dealing with an incredibly tight person, he says, “I’ll leave my bag by the gate and it’ll probably rain soon anyway.”

I feel like even the rains before the Great Flood of Noah’s arc are not going to sort this problem. I’m just relieved that he’s not made me pay, though, and this whole ordeal is over.

But I can see now that in order of rightness, here’s what should have happened.

1. He paid the £6 to get in there.

2. I paid the £6 to get in there.

So I was wrong to not do it. But he was even more wrong.

This was two years ago and I still sometimes wish I could go back in time and pay the money to avoid ruining someone’s game of tennis. And also that I’d happened to bring a pressure washer with me, as without it, that game was still ruined.

What would you have done?

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I’m so repulsed by the two words that I’m about to write that I’ve had to clear a no-eating window on either side of this. The two words combined disgust me and I feel ill just thinking them.

Okay, let’s do it. Bin juice. The liquid seepage from the bottom of a bin bag. And it’s not the actual seepage that I’m bothered about, although it’s far from ideal. It’s the two words together. Bin and juice.

I can’t even quite grasp what turns my stomach so. I tried combining ‘bin’ with other liquids to find out.

Bin water: fine

Bin tea: fine

Bin wine: fine

Bin milk: oh god, no!

But even that is not quite as bad as bin juice.

The word ‘juice’ is causing most of the problem, as I also really hate it when people talk about baked beans and they use the words ‘bean juice’.

I need to go and lie down and take some deep breaths now.

Here’s the next one. Imagine you’ve cooked some delicious penne pasta and have just poured it into a colander or sieve to drain the water. You then glance back at the empty saucepan, but see that some of the penne pasta remains. It’s got stuck to the bottom, but it’s not lying flat. It’s vertically sticking up, like some revolting sea anemone.

It’s all those holes together that kill me as I SUFFER from trypophobia. An irrational fear or repetitive holes or patterns. If you’re not sure if this would bother you, Google image it.

I went snorkelling once, which in itself is incredible, as I freak out even at the thought of a fish touching me. But I was on a day trip on a boat and had had two cocktails, so I was an entirely different version of myself. I went underwater and I was fine. Many fish brushed past me, I saw turtles swimming and I started to fantasise about becoming a scuba diver and getting my PADI certification.

And then I saw a globe shape on the seabed and it was grey and looked a bit like a rock, but it had a perfect geometric shape on it. It wasn’t just repulsive to look at; it also really troubled me. Like I’d glimpsed through a crack into the dark side. Which is admittedly unlikely while snorkelling on holiday.

Next one. When people eat an apple down to the very tiny brown spindly core. Once again, I can’t quite put my finger on what troubles me, but I have to stop eating an apple before there’s even a hint of a seed. Any change in colour and I’m gone. My partner goes right down like he’s a starving animal getting every last bit of flesh from the bone. It’s so spindly and disgusting. My son did it once and now I only give him a cut-up apple as I can’t bear it.

Last one. Cottage cheese. I’m aware that a lot of these are food-based. I think the world can be divided into those who think it would be fun to have a food fight and those who would find it disgusting. It won’t surprise you to know that I’m the latter.

There is a lot to be repulsed by when it comes to food and cottage cheese is no exception. First of all, it has irregular lumps. No, thank you. And second of all, it’s got the word ‘cottage’ in it. When I think of a cottage, I’m not thinking of anywhere particularly clean. There’s a filthy range cooker and too many ancient blankets and cushions and cat hair. I don’t know why I think this, but I do.

So put the word cottage with this lumpy stuff and I’m out forever. Fully repulsed. And if there were cottage cheese, bin juice, bean juice, upright penne pasta and a brown, spindly apple core food fight, I’d probably go into that crack to the dark side just to get away.

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