Country Living with Francis Farragher

I’m not exactly certain whether little annoyances are a good or a bad thing. On the one hand they take our mind of  the bigger issues of the world and the bully boys of the planet – West, Middle and East – but on the other hand, those little niggles can get under our skins at times.

There I was the other night, waking at that typically annoying time of 3am and trying – against the odds – to get back to sleep when the little rattles started. Somewhere a breeze or draught had found a door that was just about an inch or two ajar.

The initial response, as always, was to ignore it but just as sleep threatened to return, of it went again . . . tap, tap. Nothing for it but to get up and to identify the two main culprits – the open window and the door not fully closed. Problem solved, or maybe not, as of course, the process had to be repeated a few times before all the suspects had been located.

I’ve read scholarly articles from psychologists and therapists about the little things in life that annoy us and of course this all has to be contextualised. If I fell and broke a leg it would be something of an injury disaster but if I had a corn catching on the edge of my foot, it would slip into the annoyance category.

Annoyances probably can be categorised as vexatious rather than seriously troublesome, but have you ever been in a pub or restaurant where someone is listening to a programme, blog or match . . . without their headphones on.

Well, that just has to slip into the seriously annoying category as the entire company is treated to a cacophony of crackles coming from the phone accompanied by nods, winks and occasional bursts of laughter from the receiver. If I had the courage [but I don’t],   I would say: “Oh, for God’s sake, will you please buy a set of earphones . . . the rest of us will even pay for them.”

And then there are the footpath hoggers in towns and cities usually in either groups of threes and fours – sometimes families, sometimes not – who expect every other user of the pavement to step off into the traffic so that their little can stay intact. There’s no real malice there but the confrontation can go down to the wire before one or two of them decides to step in and let others pass.