I find as I get older that I get tetchy very easily. Often a fairly trivial thing may happen, which gets me overly irritated, cross, complaining. It often happens when I watch TV, especially those documentaries where the presenter seems more interested in projecting themselves than in the subject of the programme. It doesn’t make it any easier for me when, looking over their shoulder at the camera and constantly on the move, they become so enthused by what they are seeing that they leave little room for our own assessment. Why can’t they just sit down, talk, and leave room for our own pleasure?!

Other presenters imagine that they are terribly amusing and have long digressive chats with fellow presenters, their relationship dominating the show. That’s particularly true of local TV when it’s assumed that the viewer is amused when two people argue about each other’s opinions, with nods and winks at the camera. Is there no production control preventing such indulgence? Perhaps all this is a British thing, unknown to our Spanish readers.

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Radio journalists can tread on my tetchiness too, especially when as happens regularly on the BBC’s Today programme, they answer their own questions or rephrase the interviewee’s answers to fit the answer they wished for. Then there’s the celebrity culture we live in, which for me is a cause for major tetchiness, when people of no special consequence become famous merely for jumping through the hoops the media has provided for them. For me this is part of the artificiality of modern life where appearance is more important than substance and ‘virtual reality’ is totally unreal.

I’m not proud of my tetchiness and wonder what causes it and whether it is more a male than a female trait. The beautiful women who are most of our family members exhibit such impatience sometimes, but not to the same degree or frequency as I do.

Could it be that men more easily lack connection with the changing life around them, especially when they are retired and are less secure in their own identity? And less patient.

But I suppose tetchiness is fairly harmless. Anger and despair is another thing and, prompted by the current discovery of parliamentary corruption in this country, there’s plenty of that around at the moment.

Bryan