By Laird Chris Lilly

You may have realised by reading some of my other work that most things annoy me. This is mostly down to the sheer level of cynicism that I display on a daily basis and level of sarcasm that I employ throughout daily life. Most of the time I only share my constant sources of annoyance with close friends, (my relatives are too far away). So those who know me; this will probably come as no surprise to you. I’m excluding “the little things” from this little run down; these are the things that have happened to me that I find the most annoying out of everything that happens to me frequently.

In ascending order then, my top five annoyances:

5. I don’t stock much food in my house; I live alone and have no need to stock pile it. Instead what I do is make regular, daily sometimes, trips to the conveniently placed supermarket across the street, which happens to sell my favourite patronising slogan-ed food. It’s not the reminders of how poor I am on the food that annoys me, no, it’s the cost effective checkout regime they have in there. It’s half five in the evening, I’m rather hungry, there’s no food in and hunger to me is quite unbearable. So I make the arduous 300 metre journey to the supermarket, pick whatever I fancy for dinner that evening and then aim to get home, cook and eat whatever is in my hands as quickly as possible. But I can’t pay for it yet; there are only three checkouts open, with an array fastidious middle class people needing help with their packing, occupying all of these. So I turn to the hand basket checkout which, handily, is nearly always open, however the straggling grandparents have this one on a go-slow. There are still two options remaining, it’s this point I start to get annoyed because I know the self scans will have loads of yuppie types trying to rush through them, but constantly set off the “assistance required” alarm and the whole process ends up taking longer than it should. The cigarette kiosk is usually filled with all the yuppies who have realised they are better off letting a member of staff scan their products for them. I am usually really annoyed by the time this is all confirmed, all I want is to get home and eat my dinner!