On Monday I fancied pasta for dinner (that is, special me-friendly gluten-free pasta), so I decided to buy the necessary stuff when I went to Sainsburys on my way home from work. I went to Sainsburys, bought everything else on my list, got home, and realised I had to resort to emergency food because I didn't have the wherewithal to cook pasta.

Today I fancied pasta for dinner, and was determined that I would definitely not make the same mistake again. And I didn't. Instead, I managed to forget to go to Sainsburys at all, so once again I got home and realised I wasn't going to have pasta this evening.

Also when I got home I discovered a letter from my bank helpfully informing me that they have helpfully been neglecting to deduct income tax from my savings interest this year, for no reason I can readily determine since they've been consistently deducting it from my other accounts for years. This will cost me some fiddly letters to the taxman, I expect. I insulted the bank at the top of my voice after reading the letter, but really I think I would have to admit that the frustration was at least as much pasta- as tax-related. Today my bank are not the only utterly gormless entity out of them and me.

Every so often I want to yell very loudly as a means of letting off steam, and I tend to feel inhibited from so doing by my living arrangements.

It's not that I worry about disturbing the neighbours; it seems to me that the occasional brief howl of rage at a civilised time of day would be a very minor piece of noise pollution. If I had screaming rows with a partner for an entire hour at 3am, or late-night parties directly above beckyc's bedroom every week, that would be obvious grounds for complaint, but a single daytime yell of ‘YOU WORTHLESS EXCUSE FOR A BANK’ or similar once every month or so is not something that would bother me particularly if it came from next door, and nor is it something I'd expect next door to complain about if I did it.

No, it's mainly that I worry about the neighbours worrying about me.

Just now I did in fact yell ‘YOU WORTHLESS EXCUSE FOR A BANK’ very loudly. I didn't want to, though; what I really wanted to yell was simply ‘ARRRRGH!’, or some pithy four-letter obscenity or other. But I always irrationally worry that if I scream ‘ARRRRGH’ then some neighbour might assume I'd accidentally cut my own hand off with a kitchen knife, or some such, and come running to investigate and make sure I was all right, and I'd have to apologise and say ‘no, it's just my bank being useless’ and feel bad about putting them out and worrying them unduly. So even just now, on one of the rare occasions when I was pushed beyond my self-control and cut loose, I stopped to carefully construct a coherent sentence with which to express my frustration, on the basis that while ‘ARRRRGH’ might be misinterpreted as a life-threatening condition, ‘YOU WORTHLESS EXCUSE FOR A BANK’ was very unlikely to be. And this is a bad thing, because having to delay my scream of primal rage to put it into a coherent sentence form rather puts a crimp in the frustration-relieving effects of the scream once I finally get it out.

There's also a privacy issue on some occasions (but not this one). If I'm feeling yelling-very-loudly levels of frustration as a result of an incompetent company, that's one thing, but if it's (say) a love-life frustration then I'm quite likely to feel that I don't want my neighbours knowing that I'm terribly upset; that's a matter between me, whoever caused the problem, and whichever close friend I specifically decide to unload on. So in that situation I feel particularly hemmed in by all those ears in nearby dwellings, and wish I lived in a detached house where I could scream my head off as much as I liked (within reason) and not worry about it too much.

(This isn't, incidentally, a post about my attempted house purchase. The house I'm trying to buy is only semi-detached, so I don't expect it to cure me of feeling inhibited by the existence of a neighbour.)

Curiously, my car tends to be the place where I feel most able to have a good shout and get it out of my system, because unlike my flat it is fully detached. So when I really need to shout about something private like woman-trouble, that's generally where I do it. That seems thoroughly silly, but it's the best I've got.