I suppose it's my intolerance but I find myself grimacing more and more when people use the word "like" in virtually every sentence.
I enjoy watching the programme "Escape to the Country." It's the one where the BBC pick three properties for couples wanting to move to the country in the UK. Invariably the couples end up going for none of them and the whole thing becomes irrelevant.
In yesterday's show they loved all three they were shown but then ignored all of them, made an offer for a different property we hadn't been shown and that one fell through and so I was left with the feeling of "hasn't this been just a teeny bit pointless?"
Every room they walked into they let out a shout of "wow." Usually both of them wowed at the same time. But obviously the properties weren't wowful enough.
Other things I hate are degrees of uniqueness. How many times have you heard people say "it's almost unique" or "it's totally unique"? Sorry but something is either unique or it isn't - there are no degrees of uniqueness.
Another annoying thing is prefacing every sentence with the word "so" or "look" or "listen." Sports interviewees often start answers to questions with "look" or "listen" and the problem is I find myself listening and looking for this rather than listening and looking at what is being said.
* * *
What I do love is a village sale. Call me old fashioned but I go weak at the knees at the sight of a book sale or a tombola stall. You know the kind where you spend a fiver, win a bottle of wine that you could have bought in the supermarket for £4.99.
A couple of years ago we took the grandkiddles on the North Norfolk Railway to see Santa. The train ran from Sheringham to Weybourne which was all of four miles. It went very slowly as we had to eat mince pies and drink a glass of sherry before the train stopped and it only took a few minutes.
At the other end there was Santa's grotty (sorry grotto) and a tombola. We bought a number of tickets, mainly because I didn't want to win anything. Let me explain. Losers received a North Norfolk Railway calendar for taking part and this was rather good. But of course we ended up winning a very strange jigsaw that I have never done, a tin of biscuits and a water pistol. At least the biscuits found a good home in various tummies.
I have a friend who cannot pass a tombola without buying tickets even when there is absolutely nothing that he wants to win.
Anyway yesterday we went to what was described as a table-top sale in Weybourne Village Hall. It was a quintessential English sale, full of coffee, cake and sausage rolls and things nobody wants like a whole host of new hardbacks and paperbacks by Jeffrey Archer. Does anyone read Jeffrey Archer books anymore and why were there so many in Weybourne?
This was a question I put to the chap behind the stall who said he used to work with Archer. I didn't delve any further into the association. Neither did I buy any of Archer's books primarily because we need to get rid of books rather than collect more.
Table top/Village hall sales are not totally unique (see what I did there?) to the UK though. Many years ago we sat on two planes for a combined total of well over 24 hours to find ourselves over the other side of the world in New Zealand.
And what did we do the next day? We ate fish and chips and went to a village hall sale. Maybe jet leg had something to do with it.
Anyway enough of this dreadful rubbish. You may have noticed in this blog I have fashioned some new words - wowfull and wowed and grandkiddles being three of them. These words are of course completely unique.it.