Room 101

Items I would like to see consigned to Room 101:

• Cats
• Pigeons
• Cats amongst pigeons
• People who feed cats and/or pigeons
• People who say, “I'm more of a cat person, myself”
• Dumfries
• Children in pubs
• Curtain tie-backs
• Curtain-pulls
• Shower curtains
• Pelmets
• People in front of you who walk/drive just too slowly
• Long jokes
• Fundamentalism (of any kind)
• Clowns
• Mass-produced sausages
• Any sport done to music
• Any sport where points are awarded for artistic interpretation
• Any sport which is only ever participated in by women
• Wind farms
• Pseudo-science
• Vegetarian food masquerading as meat
• Pubs with fake Olde English names
• Pubs with the word furkin in their names
• People who change pubs' names
• Gazumping
• Best of albums containing previously unreleased tracks
• People who say question mark when they mean question
• Offal
• Flash™ graphics
• Nitro-keg bitter
• Shopping for clothes
• Shopping for food
• People on your side in an argument who can't argue properly
• People on your side in an argument who can argue, but who are dickheads
• Astrologers and other soothsaying charlatans
• The music of Phil Collins
• People whose hi-fi systems are more valuable than their music collections
• People whose cars are more valuable than their music collections
• People who say CDs sound better than vinyl (they really need to listen)
• Being told that my call is important while I'm on hold in a queue
• Decorating
• People who boast I never understood [X] at school, who still don't
• UHT milk
• People without cars who think everyone should use public transport
• Drinking good whisky from cheap glasses
• Copper coins
• The phrase the Home Counties
• Overpriced software with far more features than it needs
• Royalty
• The Nobility
• People who borrow your CDs for too long
• Fax technology
• People with ridiculous theories who cite Galileo as a persecuted forerunner
• Amplified music in pubs
• Appending the suffix -gate to anything with even a hint of scandal
• Appending the suffix -rage to a noun instead of simply saying impatience
• People who put the stress on the first syllable of the word Birkenhead
• Having your blood pressure taken
• Tea from vending machines
• People who use K as an abbreviation for thousand when talking about money
• People who say grand instead of thousand
• Cushions
• Dog shows
• Fast food which isn't Fish & Chips
• People who abbreviate the word and to 'n'
• Wimbledon fortnight
• Band-waggon-jumper-oners [to use my dad's wonderful phrase]
• People who like 2 amuse U with their wacky spelling
• Spam (in both its electronic and culinary forms)
• Junk mail and unsolicited phone calls
• Any telephone conversation which lasts longer than 60 seconds
• Pogonophobia
• People who use the word literally when talking figuratively
• Continental-style toilets where you have to crap onto a ledge
• People who use apostrophe's to denote plural's
• The phrase he or she (what's wrong with they?)
• People who claim lager is much better on the continent (it's still shite)
• Sticky price labels which leave a mark when you remove them
• Sticky labels on fruit
• Safety matches
• Lottery millionaires who say it won't change their lives
• Newspapers
• Mowing the lawn
• Mobile phone tunes
• Adding anything to whisky
• Housing estates named after the flora destroyed to build them
• Cold beer
• Motorists who use hazard warning lights to indicate illegal parking
• Brass fixtures and fittings
• Replacing swear-words with f***ing asterisks
• Bleeped-out swear-words on television
• Coloured bathroom suites
• Saturday evening television
• Receiving personal emails from paedophiles [I write from experience]
• Having to wear a tie to appear professional
• Mild cheese
• The expression too clever by half
• CDs with a long gap before the final track
• Spongey bread
• Cryptic crosswords themed on an extremely obscure subject
• Cryptic crosswords that hinge upon a single clue
• People who say Cleese was the funniest Python (it was Palin, you idiots!)
• Screws with slots, as opposed to cross-heads
• Brass screws
• Single sheets inserted into double-sheet newspapers
• Letterboxes which are too small for the letters you want to post
• Slugs
• Mensa
• Anyone who talks about IQ as if it actually means anything
• Fish- and steak-knives
• Chewing gum
• The white powder that accumulates around the tops of milk bottles
• Cyclists who undertake at traffic lights
• Cyclists who go through red traffic lights
• Cyclists who ride on the pavement
• Background music on TV news bulletins
• People who make sexist/racist comments in front of you, assuming you agree
• Police cars driving at 68mph in the slow lane on motorways
• English wine
• The phrase post-modern
• This colour
• Flannel face-cloths
• Dove™ soap
• Baby On Board signs
• Ironing
• Soldering
• Evangelical feminists
• The smell of money
• British pub licensing hours
• Birmingham
• People who make meaningless comparisons
• Moths
• Mixed vegetables
• Christian fish logos on cars
• People at the front of queues who haven't decided what to buy yet
• The new shrink-wrapped KitKat™ bars
• People who get into the same segment as you in revolving doors
• Wrapping presents
• Self-appointed spokespersons
• The word spokesperson
• Radio 4's Thought for the Day
• 3-D bar-charts, pie-charts and graphs
• Corporate sponsorship of social science research for cheap publicity
• Patenting genes
• The smell of disinfectant
• The doctrine of papal infallibility
• People who judge historical figures against modern moral standards
• Customised scrollbars on web pages
• Linkrot
• People who can't tell the difference between margarine and butter
• Squirty cream in cans
• Pre-sliced cheese
• Breaking your leg
• Mangetout
• Baby sweetcorn
• Dictionaries with thumb-indexes
• People who say that should be thumb-indices
• Tattoos [If you want to make a statement, wear a wacky tie]
• People who try to make a statement by wearing a wacky tie
• Graffiti
• Olives (unless they've been converted into oil)
• The new BBC1 TV idents
• People who put advertisments under cars' windscreen wipers
• The way the TV's volume increases during commercial breaks
• People who don't know which fish names are funny and which aren't
• Grown men with ponytails
• Bald men with ponytails
• Rolls Royce cars
• Medleys
• Royal correspondents
• Whoever it is who puts all the water into bacon
• People who think my driveway is a turning circle
• Young pop-stars who issue cover versions of classic songs
• Surround-sound hi-fi
• Filling in expense claim forms
• UK products that internationalised their names (Snickers™, Starburst™, Cif™, etc.)
• Theme pubs
• Filling up my car with petrol
• Decaffeinated coffee
• Unreliable builders (i.e. builders)
• Being sober when everyone else is drunk
• Standard legal disclaimers on emails
• Having your mobile phone ring when you're sitting on the toilet
• Boxing
• Roadworks (especially roadworks with nobody doing any work in them)
• Southerners harping on about the M25
• Having mice in your house
• How's my driving? stickers on the back of vans
• People who let their kids press the buttons for them at cashpoint machines
• People who walk in one direction and look in another
• The jelly in pork pies
• People who give considered responses to enquiries after their health
• People who take pushchairs into shops
• Colleagues whose idea of washing their mug is to leave it in the sink
• People who find bottle banks full, but leave their bottles anyway
• Deep pan pizzas
• The run-up to Christmas
• The fact that England's Glory matches are now made in Sweden
• People who forward jokes without removing the previous forwarding details
• Collagen lips
• Music shops that file Captain Beefheart under 'C'
• Having your clutch cable snap on a motorway approach-road roundabout
• Shampoo and cosmetics commercials that use invented 'scientific' jargon
• Baileys Irish Cream
• The limericks of Edward Leer (they're shite, basically)
• Marzipan
• Halloween Special episodes of The Simpsons
• Hardback books printed on cheap paper
• Putting trousers on hangers
• People who wait for the lift to arrive before clocking off
• Thin people who say, "I need to lose weight"
• People who invent mythical genes
• Being told off by Windows for not shutting down properly after a crash
• Dogs' pissing on your briefcase
• Body studs that aren't in ear-lobes
• TV weather forecasters who don't have degrees in meteorology
• Weather forecasts that give percentage chances of rain
• White rappers
• Rap music (with a capital 'C')
• Boy bands
• Girl bands
• Jamie Theakston
• Ben Elton
• Goatee beards
• Paper clips that think they can write letters better than me
• Moustaches (why not go the whole hog?)
• Nudists
• When a great TV programme suddenly goes To Be Continued…
• Hercule Poirot
• Hate lists