Oh dear.

I wonder sometimes why I get so horribly het up over the smallest of things. Maybe it’s my control-freak tendencies running away with me. I realise of course that it’s not rational to expect everyone else to conform to my idea of acceptability, but sometimes I just wish they’d try a bit harder. The reason this has come up today is that I have just seen a grown woman with sticky labels on the soles of her shoes. This is, without a doubt, the worst sort of label crime (slightly lower on the scale of evil is people wandering about, oblivious, with giant labels sticking out of their neckline, or, more horribly, their waistline) and I just fail to see why it occurs. If you buy, say, a new pair of trousers you’re probably going to cut the tags out before you wear them. Your telly isn’t in the corner of the room, resplendent in its polystyrene corners and that weird stuff that isn’t fabric but isn’t plastic that is draped over the screen in the box. When you go swimming, are you constantly adjusting your swimmers because you’ve left that revolting hygiene strip in the crotch (am I alone in finding that vile? Why is it better for me to touch a sticky label that other people have rubbed their parts on than to simply wash a swimsuit before wearing it, thereby eliminating the possibility of inadvertently coming into contact with a stranger’s vag?)….I think not. So why, on purchasing a shiny beautiful new pair of shoes, do people not take the fucking labels off the bottoms before wearing them? There’s a woman in my office who (and this is how sad I am – it’s stuck in my memory) came to work one winter morning looking absolutely immaculate. Except when she turned and walked away all I could see were the great big stickers on the soles of her boots announcing that she was a size seven and that they weren’t actually leather. Shame on her. Shame on all of you. And if I sneak up behind you in town and tuck your label back into your t-shirt, you’ve only got yourselves to blame.

I really, really need to get out more. Or less. Or something.