Thursday, August 31, 2017

one of those nights

Did you ever have one of those nights where you go to bed tired and at a reasonable hour and you wake up at 1.30 a.m. after disturbing dreams and go to the loo and then you can't get back to sleep because your brain won't stop flitting about so you listen to an episode of Book of the Week on iPlayer and then another and another because it's so good and then you go to the loo again and try to go back to sleep and can't, and you spend the rest of the night in alternating bouts of dreadful dreams and trips to the loo and when you finally open your eyes to see the pale morning light of 6.25 creeping round the blinds and feel like death and need more sleep you decide to wake up because you can't stand any more appalling dreams. I just had one of those nights. It was hateful.

I have wondered about having a blog post on pet hates but have felt uncomfortable about it because this is my profile on Twitter:





But now I've started with last night, I will just tell you a couple of other things. I hate seeing people wasting champagne by making it fizz and squirting it. I hate it at any time, but I particularly hate seeing those lottery ads where they do it. I love champagne. If they don't want to drink it they should send it round here.

I hate those flowers called red hot pokers. 

I hate going in a cafe and seeing an amazing cake and persuading myself I can afford the calories and having a slice and finding it is dry and that the icing isn't butter icing and that my home made cakes are so much nicer.

I hate the grammatical construction that I think came over from the USA and which is now so embedded in UK usage that even the best journalists use it - the use of "like" instead of "as if."

e.g. "He was jumping up and down on the thing like he wanted to break it."
instead of
"He was jumping up and down on the thing as if he wanted to break it."

But the one I hate most is the use of "literally" as an intensifier, so that when I said to someone recently that I literally fell over, the person did not grasp that what I said had actually happened. 

I have other pet hates. They are written on a tiny pink post-it which is somewhere on my desk for just such a blog post as this, but I can't find it so I am going to stop with the hate. I'm sure that after a third mug of sugared tea I'll feel better.




5 comments:

marmee said...

oh gosh! Had one of those nights this very week! And that cake thing!! You get all that cake lust going and then the terrible let down and you feel like letting rip with a tantrum!!

Sue Hepworth said...

You made me laugh, Marmee!

Anonymous said...

Something strange about last night - both of us had similar to you. Then another friend said the same, this morning.

Pet hate in grammar is 'out the window.' No!!

But when a bite of cake turns out more deliciously moist than you could ever have hoped (I'm talking recent Lemon Drizzle @Little Bo Cafe, Sennen Cove) - then that's a When Harry Met Sally moment!

Sue Hepworth said...

Oh yes - "I'm having what she's having."
I'll have to come down to Sennen Cove and try that cake.

Christine said...

I rarely have bad dreams but last night I did. I dreamed among other awful things that I was reading my most recent novel and it was full of typos and other errors (which is very far from being the case). With you on all the hates (except that I don't feel strongly about red hot pokers).