Minor irritants hold the key to keeping calm and carrying on

I suspect this is not going to be popular, but I have a suggestion for a way to manage our reactions to the current situation and it is this: focus on minor irritants. It’s not very Blitz spirit, I know. But, actually, it is a way of keeping calm and carrying on: it’s just that carrying on in my world involves a relatively high level of irritation most of the time.

We are usually exhorted to think of happier things when times are tough – and there are plenty of those, even for naturally peevish types like me. I love the gradual unfurling of the natural world at this time of year: the sun is absurdly welcome, before hayfever and heat rash kick in, and every few hours there’s a new bud or shoot. I enjoy watching the blue tits in the yard, chattering and squabbling over seeds and my dog’s tender pink belly exposed as he lies, limbs akimbo and face saggy with deep relaxation. But thinking of these things now takes on an elegiac quality that intensifies my anxiety: life is full of beauty and joy – and it feels fragile.

In contrast, if I focus on the trivial things that still annoy me – because despite the existential threat, I have inexplicably failed to enter a state of total saintly forbearance – I find it obscurely calming.

My friend F and I have been doing this intermittently for months, after she suggested I read The Madwoman in the Volvo, US writer Sandra Tsing Loh’s darkly hilarious account of her perimenopausal semi-madness. In it she discusses those “quotidian irritants that can cause the elevator to drop”, which she calls “gloomlets”. Loh’s include the colour yellow, muffins and “the food samples at Trader Joe’s – so limited, so always disappointing”.

Even before things became terrible, I found sharing sources of irritation took their sting away. Once I had written them down, I could laugh at their – my – essential ridiculousness. Now, faced with genuinely unmanageable problems, there’s an odd “life goes on” reassurance to trotting them out. Exercising my pettiness muscles, weakened by pervasive dread, seems to help, somehow. Maybe give it a try? Don’t tell me you’re no longer annoyed by little things, cheek by jowl with your nearest and dearest for prolonged periods. I’ll get you started: I have both gloomlets and ragelets, which are equally effective.

1. My neighbour keeps putting his rubbish in my recycling box: single-use plastic, aerosols, a coffee jar full of fag butts. This is enraging on two levels: first, the absolute cheek of it, get your own box, you chancer. Second, and more subtly infuriating, he has ruined my unblemished record with the recycling people, for which I was hoping to win an award one day. Most Diligent Recycler, perhaps. No longer.

2. Who is hoarding nail clippers and why won’t they admit it? Often in the evenings I hear the phantom sound of nails being cut and follow it like a woman possessed, throwing open doors and making accusations, but no, everyone says they were “just playing with the remote control” or “why are you here, please go away”. I’m not fooled.

3. The kidnap of the Good Towel – 99% of our towels were pensioned out of a holiday cottage business in the 1990s as being too threadbare for paying customers. We do, however, have one huge, fluffy one, acquired in a fit of uncharacteristic extravagance. I do not remember the last time I got a turn of the Good Towel: whenever I launder and put it away, it vanishes, instantly, turning up weeks later, damp and smelly. It’s not on.

4. The area under the salad drawer in the fridge is permanently flooded. Just when I had finally reclaimed it from four hibernating tortoises (don’t ask), I now have to deal with a tide of fetid water whenever I try to make lunch.

5. Limescale. Something happened when I turned 40: now limescale genuinely upsets me. I wish to return to a more innocent time when the state of the kettle didn’t ruin my morning.

6. I don’t want to admit this, but in the spirit of togetherness in the face of adversity I will: it turns out the strange irritation on my scalp is ringworm. Ringworm! How the hell did I get ringworm? It’s the kind of thing a Victorian reformer would deplore in a pamphlet about afflicted street urchins. I blame my habit of patting every passing dog, but given the current intensive scrutiny of hygiene, everyone thinks I’m just a bit gross. Even the pharmacist recoiled when I told him and it’s his job not to look disgusted.

I could go on. I will go on, muttering away, self-soothing with a litany of minor complaints. How bad can it really be, I suppose I’m thinking, if I’m still annoyed by ringworm and limescale? Perhaps soon I’ll find my husband’s incessant foot tapping a welcome distraction, but thankfully we’re not quite there yet.

Follow Emma on Twitter @BelgianWaffling