Good morning. In the long history of the First Edition Compendium of Things That Annoyed Me From The Previous 12 Months, also known as FECOTTAMFTP12M, also known as the Thingies, people have often asked me: you seem like such an easygoing guy, Arch. Why the rage? Where’s it coming from? What gives? It’s Christmas!
To which I notionally reply: are you trying to get on the list, mate? Stop saying “what gives”, you’re not in a sitcom. Don’t confuse a pathological aversion to personal conflict for genuine bonhomie! Also, read the list. Where is the lie??
Here it is, then, in what, in a crowded field, critics are calling the most unjustifiably long newsletter of the year: 36 weirdly intense objections to unexceptional aspects of life in 2024. Thanks to the many misanthropic readers who shared their own deranged bugbears; apologies to those we didn’t have space for, but if you think I’m ditching any of mine so I can fit in more of yours you are sorely mistaken. Have a nice Christmas, or as nice as you can given that turkey stinks and you’re sleeping in your in-laws’ broom cupboard. Here are the headlines.
In depth: 36 things to ditch in 2025
Brat everything
Not so much the original coinage by Charli xcx and its sharp-eyed description of a certain chaotic hedonism, especially among young women; more the way it got grafted on to many, many other things that are in no way chaotically hedonistic, in order to make you look at them. Summer, fine. Going out, fine. I’ll even give you Kamala Harris. But also: autumn. Staying in. Both Stephen Kinnock and Emily Thornberry while DJing at Labour party conference, according to Politico. Jane Austen. The British economy. A nan in Asda. Going to Butlin’s. Crochet shoelaces. The royal armouries. A press release I received about the TV channel Gold’s annual Christmas cracker joke competition. The below email subject line:
Congrats to Currys. I found several of these by Googling the stupidest phrases I could think of + “brat”. Obviously it’s the “word of the year”, a designation that arguably merits its own entry, tbh.
Susie Dent’s word of the day
Should Satan arise from the abyss and send his vengeful angels among us, thieving the firstborn child of each and raining putrid lava from his nostrils as he sucks the oceans dry and, lo, rends the very leaves from the trees, try to find a moment to check X, formerly Twitter. There you will find Susie Dent posting her word of the day: “Beelzebuggered: the state of being mildly put out by the arrival of the end times”.
Plastic bottle tops that don’t come off
Thanks to Adam Pope, who lists several persuasive arguments for his case, including the superbly esoteric grumble that you now need three hands to refill one bottle from another, and has made me distractingly aware of yet another marginal irritant that I had heretofore managed to ignore. Turns out it’s the EU’s fault even though we’ve left and these are woke bottle tops (that is, actually quite good for the environment), which you probably didn’t even realise! Brexit betrayed!!!!
Jeremy Clarkson
Crusader for the rights of farmers facing new inheritance tax obligations on estates worth more than £1m. Tribune of the working bumpkin who rejects the claim that the move is necessary to close a loophole being seized on by the very wealthy. In no way motivated by previous acknowledgment, subsequently reversed, that he bought a farm so that “the government doesn’t get any of my money when I die”. Reportedly paid £13m a year by Amazon and ITV.
Jake Paul
You’d say he’s not a good advert for getting hit in the head a lot, but he’s always been like this.
James Dyson
Crusader for the rights of farmers facing new inheritance tax obligations on estates worth more than £1m. Tribune of the working bumpkin who rejects the claim that the move is necessary to close a loophole being seized on by the very wealthy. In no way motivated by owning close to 15,000 hectares (36,000 acres) of farmland in England. Worth about £10bn.
Laddy Instagram food accounts losing their minds over average burgers
As with everything I hate on social media, impossible to tell whether this is a universal irritant or just a humiliating tell of the kinds of things the algorithm thinks I’m personally going to love. (See also: relatable memes of dads forgetting what they were meant to buy at the supermarket!)
Either way, these accounts are the absolute worst: generically handsome guys with subtly trimmed Russell Group accents going along to the press opening of some dismal venture-capital backed posh fast food place, deploying oversaturated extreme closeups of sweaty ground beef, and saying things like [real quote]: “It’s like there’s a nightclub in my mouth.” Yeah boiii! First of all, I absolutely do not want a nightclub in my mouth, that sounds tremendously unhygienic, thanks; second of all, why are you getting so worked up about “diner cheese”?
Estate agent house-tour videos
If houses were mediocre burgers, basically. Hats off to whoever first grafted the aesthetic of MTV Cribs on to the British property market (this guy) and used it to perpetuate the lie that it’s better to have three pantries, neon handwriting wall art, and terrazzo his’n’her sinks than a back garden. But there’s someone at a Foxtons near me who’s wearing a red carpet frock to hawk a “turnkey townhouse” that I happen to know is a bleak three-bed where someone probably got murdered, so shall we call an amnesty on these videos for a bit?
Wholly disproportionate online security protocols
Annoying Kim Wilson, Theres Lessing, Noor Ahmed, and everyone else on planet Earth. “You try to log in, you get sent an email to click on, but you logged in via your emails app, so when you go to check your emails the log-in disappears, etc,” says Theres. “Why would someone try to hack into my time sheets?” Warming to her theme, she adds: “Also, having to create an account for EVERYTHING. My partner recently had to set one up (including a verification email, of course) to get an appointment for a haircut. It took about half an hour.” Preaching to the choir, Theres, and I will be screwing with your holiday allocation later today!
People letting you know they’re moving to Bluesky
“See you over at the other place, put the kettle on,” they will say, adorably, although the way this lot go on about it you’d think Twitter circa 2012 was the Haçienda circa 1989. Calls to mind the old joke: how do you know someone hasn’t got a television? Because they bloody tell you. Nobody cares!
People sitting on other people’s shoulders at gigs and festivals
“They block out the artists you have been waiting to see for hours with a ‘Look at me, everyone’ attitude,” says Peter Bennett, who is not having it. “These people are rarely small.”
‘Banter timelines’, ‘season finales’
Guys, all this has been going on for eight years, minimum. Cute though the device may have been at some point in 2016, perhaps it’s time to give up the idea that this is anything other than cold, miserable reality.
‘If only they’d been like this during the campaign’
Re: Rishi Sunak after he lost, and also Kamala Harris after she lost, and also: Theresa May, Ed Miliband, David Cameron, John Kerry, Gordon Brown, George W Bush, Iain Duncan Smith for God’s sake, and myriad others. Annoying partly because it’s frequently a shortcut to political rehabilitation for people who really don’t deserve it, but also because it is a classic example of unearned cosiness: that is, the claim that everything and everyone is nice when actually it’s just that there’s nothing left to be cynical and rapacious about. You might almost think that, rather than politicians suddenly getting good at their jobs when they lose, it’s just a lot easier to be likable when you don’t have a fragile electoral coalition to hold together. Quite funny that nobody’s ever said this about Liz Truss, mind you.
SLUGS
Thanks to Fay Ross-Magenty for this one. Capitals contributor’s own. No explanation given or, I suppose, needed.
Press junket discourse
This started in earnest in 2022, when the Don’t Worry Darling press tour led to a frenzied debate about Olivia Wilde’s love triangle with Harry Styles and her fiance, Jason Sudeikis, and intense questions about whether Wilde and Florence Pugh really liked each other, but went to the moon this year – thanks to Blake Lively’s (recently horribly confirmed) tension with director and co-star Justin Baldoni while promoting It Ends With Us, and, most spectacularly, Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande something something “holding space” while promoting Wicked.
Now it’s a standard feature of the movie publicity machine: close readings of the behaviour of A-listers towards their co-stars, leading to wildly disproportionate conclusions about their personalities and generosity of spirit. Absolutely ruining the perfectly enjoyable experience of watching them sit through their 27th anodyne banter interview of the day and try to act as if they don’t think the people interrogating them are pond scum. Having said all that, Erivo and Grande are really quite odd, aren’t they?
Trying to make Glicked happen
Relatedly: the happy coincidence of Barbie and Oppenheimer coming out the same weekend, both being monster hits, and creating a cultural moment of friendly disagreement over which one you liked more, was a very nice thing for the movie business. But just as Bennifer and Brangelina never qualified “Hiddleswift” as a thing, I am absolutely not having Gladiator and Wicked getting portmanteaued.
Astroturfed celebrity lookalike contests
Genuinely organic viral event in New York to crown the closest doppelganger of Timothée Chalamet, attended by Chalamet himself to the amazement of everyone present: completely delightful and funny, no notes! Paul Mescal lookalike contest in Dublin sponsored by Lidl: OK, I guess! Harry Styles thing in London with a prize presented by someone from Love Island, Dev Patel equivalent in San Francisco, Jeremy Allen White thing in Chicago, Zayn Malik thing in New York, another Jeremy Allen White one in New York that nobody showed up to, similarly underwhelming Zendaya one in California, Glen Powell one in Texas, Tom Holland one, JFK one, genuinely one for the suspect in the assassination of healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, gross – that’s enough now thanks, although more than one woman and fewer than umpteen takes would have also been fine!
Bravely defying conventional wisdom about election results
If there is an election, there is a pundit, about two days out, saying that they just don’t think this is going to go the way people think. They have a sense of the mood “out there”; perhaps they feel it in their waters. This is a canny move, since it puts them in direct opposition to pollsters, who everyone knows are stupid and bad. If they are right, they preen about it forever; if they are wrong, the stench of Bad Punditry wafts away into the ether, and they have another go, as many times as they like.
Candid camera moments in documentaries
Pointed out to me last month and now annoying me every single time I see it: the bit at the start of almost every very serious documentary where the subject fiddles with their mic a bit, someone brings in a light, they have a quick sip of tea, and then say: “Let’s begin.” Not exactly Robert Durst admitting to murder in the Jinx, is it? Also, no need for a drone camera bit on the credits, you’re interviewing him in Richmond.
And while we’re at it …
Elon Musk, according to too many of you to list; heated news stories about the unexceptional placement of pictures in Downing Street; herds of Lime bikes getting in my way (and also Kate Kelly’s way, DJ Green’s way, and Courtney Allsop’s way) on the pavement; people leaving the BBC, for any reason, all the time; “gifting” instead of “giving”, fumes Lucy Flett, as she wraps another lump of coal for someone’s stocking; Mark Zuckerberg releasing a cover of Get Low with T-Pain as an anniversary gift to his wife and announcing it on Instagram, and any other information about Mark Zuckerberg’s leisure activities; “Euston bloody station”, which waltzes into the list because it was submitted by Guardian legend Ian Cobain; Allison Pearson.
Did you think we were done? We’re not done: the absolute pain in the arse for every electric vehicle owner of navigating the 27 different charging apps required to reliably make your car run, with thanks to Lyn Ebbs; Deadpool; Ryan Reynolds generally; actors who keep their mouths open all the time, specifically Eddie Redmayne in Day of the Jackal and Colman Domingo in The Madness (it’s never bothered me, but I’m not denying Emma O’Bryen her moment, and I really appreciate the pettiness); references to two-tier anything, including a row about football armbands; people getting annoyed when petitions don’t reverse actual events, like elections; the demise of hard plastic lids on yoghurt pots, which has Adrienne Watson ready to man the barricades; crowds at political podcast live shows acting as if they’re seeing Elvis in ’56; Bluey. Sorry! She’s overexposed!
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