Inanimate objects are frequently the bane of my life. They just don’t behave themselves. Does anyone else feel this way?

I almost never lose my temper with people. It’s so rarely productive to blow up in a situation with other people.

Inanimate objects, though, are a different kettle of fish, to coin an animate phrase. I can be in a great frame of mind, and then catch a loop of something on a door handle, or have to untangle a set of wires, and I’m furious within a heartbeat.

Nowhere is this short fuse – going from happy to apoplectic in the space of a few seconds – more evident than when dealing with coat hangers, especially when they hunt in packs. They are the devil’s work and if I was ever invited on Room 101 they would be gone; gone I tell you.

It is, of course, completely irrational that I should get so worked up by something that can’t help itself or answer back. It’s not the mark of an intelligent man. I like to think it’s the mark of a slightly paranoid individual who thinks there might be something to conspiracy theories and plain bad luck after all.