Long life: I just get grumpier with age

My irritability grows with age and tends to attach itself to things that surprise even me — for example, to the widely popular sight of people riding horses on country roads. The smug, self-righteous look on their faces makes my blood simmer dangerously. And another thing that particularly grates with me at the moment is the ubiquitous use of the expression ‘no problem’. Until recently the normal response to a ‘thank you’ would be ‘that’s quite all right’ or ‘my pleasure’ or maybe even, in the American manner, ‘you’re welcome’. But now, in Northamptonshire at any rate, it is always ‘no problem’; and while this is presumably meant to be polite, it comes across to me as offensive.

Say someone entering a shop in front of you holds the door open for you to go through, and you thank them for doing it; if they say ‘no problem’, your gratitude dries up at once. What do they mean by it? Of course, there is no problem. What sort of problem could there possibly be in holding a door open for somebody? It’s such a basic little courtesy that only failure to perform it might be seen as problematic. Yet here’s this person claiming to have done something special and virtuous by failing to let a door shut in your face.

Here’s another example. Being old and boring and middle class, I listen a lot to Radio 4, which on the whole I enjoy — except for that moment between programmes when an announcer decides to tell you what station you are tuned into. ‘This is Radio Four,’ he says — or, rather, he doesn’t. He says, ‘This IS Radio Four,’ with the emphasis on the ‘is’. Until recently this weird inflexion occurred only occasionally on the BBC, but now it is routine, and I cannot imagine why.