Is it just because I am a grumpy old(ish) man that the number of things that drive me bonkers is increasing day by day?

My wife says so; but she only thinks that because she doesn’t venture out into the wide world as frequently or as far as I do. A domestic life ministering (magnificently, I hasten to add) to the five adults who live in our home and the couple of dozen other assorted quadrupeds who live in and around it offers less opportunity to be appalled of High Wycombe on a daily basis.

Take today. Three drivers in quick succession felt no need to indicate to me, immediately behind them, that they were about to turn right.

Yet another service provider presented me with a series of phone options (humorously purporting to be helplines) that either led nowhere, didn’t fit my requirements or instructed me to access their website. As the service provider concerned was BT and my internet was down, this was more than a tad irritating.

My less-than-a-year-old computer has had, it transpires, a USB failure. The manufacturers will sort it out under the guarantee and would collect it. Did I have the original packaging?

Now, there may be people out there with mansions and tied cottages who could stash all the original packaging materials for their repairable items in some uninhabited mundungus room in the west wing but I am not one of them.

I wonder if anyone reading this is?

I was instructed in that case that I must package it as securely as I could but they couldn’t take responsibility for any damage etc etc.

Half an acre of bubble wrap and cardboard later and the courier whisks my computer away for ‘five to ten days’. What will I do?

Then I turn on the radio and hear people talking about ‘innocent victims’ of all the horrible things that are happening around the world at the moment.

Why does a victim have to earn the right to be pitied and cared for by presenting their innocence credentials? Who would a guilty victim be in an aeroplane, or suburb of Gaza, or in Iraq?

Very few of the slaughtered are guilty of anything other than the fact that they have the misfortune to live where they do when they do.

Forget all the other stuff. We should all be very grumpy about that.