I've just had a letter from a reader, and don't get me wrong, I enjoy letters from readers, who was fairly congratulatory about a recent column which rather railed against no smoking rules in various places, but said she found the cat columns rather dull.

Dull? Cat stories? Goodness me. I'd better not mention it to the cats or they'll be planning a suitable revenge in the shape of late night visits and desiccated voles.

This lady suggests I concentrate a bit more on telling everyone about the things I hate - a down market Anne Robinson.

I can do that, although it's more a question of fuming, getting irritated and occasionally blowing my top.

For instance; this morning I had another of those drivers in one of those indiscriminate brand new cars which shout 'look what I've got' behind me.

You know the sort, nearly always a bloke, often with jacket hanging on a hook in the back, shiny briefcase on the seat and an attitude problem which refuses to allow anyone, especially a woman, to be in front of them. So despite the fact that there's a tractor, three lorries and a bus up ahead he passes me on a bend, swerves in front and spends the next six miles with his shiny little bumper up the backside of the bus. I'm pleased to see he's still there when we reach Liskeard.

I absolutely loathe having to telephone anywhere where you have to push the buttons on your phone to get through to various departments. You know 'press button one if its a general inquiry, press button four if you want to talk to one of our sales people, press button six if you have been waiting so long you want to shout abuse at our manager.'

Even worse if they say 'press the star button to continue' and you want to shout 'what star button, I haven't got a star button', but there's nobody listening. Once I did the whole thing and the last button press got me back to the first one; I could have been there for ever.

Nowadays, if you ring your bank or any company holding your personal details you have to go through a long rigmarole of the code word, your important dates, the number moles on your left leg. I know it's security but I'm having difficulty in remember what I did last week, never mind what I idly told them eight years ago. What is even more annoying is that they don't tell you if you've got the questions right or wrong, there's just a stony silence and another question.

I despise myself for falling for those 'you're on the final run-up to winning a million' letters you get from various companies, dare I say a certain company which produces small magazines being one of the worst. I know perfectly well I'm not going to win a million, not if I order 74 of their map books or 'Glorious Views of England and Wales' but still a little voice says 'someone's got to win' in my head. Why don't they just write to me with their clever machine which is capable of embossing my name in gold on all the enclosures - ie 'Mrs Richards of Callington you are well on the way to being our big summer winner' and say 'just send for the books and we'll never bother you again'. That would work for me.

It's the same with those scratch card things which fall out of magazines. 'if you've got three stars, or three pots of gold or three bananas you have definitely won one of the star prizes' they scream. And you know there's a catch and yet you still do it and make the five minute telephone call costing goodness knows what. then you find out what you knew all along , that you have won the £250 holiday voucher which is great except it's off a £5,000 tour of Acapulco which would be fine if you could find the other £4,750 to go with your voucher.

Lessons aren't learned - I've just been caught because I sent for a pair of free tights, which eventually arrived and now a package with six pairs of tights has arrived which I didn't order, don't want and will have to return or I'll get harassed for the cost of something I never wanted in the first place. I expect they think most people will just pay for them, but will they then send twelve pairs? And so on. Maddening is not the right word.

I abhor all forms of junk food. Sorry, if you're just sitting down to a pop toast thing filled with boiling red jammy substance, but there it is.

Junk food has produced 'ready meals' which are one of the most anti-social foodstuffs you can get because they do away with having to lay the table, put out the condiments and group everyone round for the pleasurable hurly burly of family mealtimes. They make table manners a thing of the past, which is why so many children seem totally incapable of holding a knife and fork nor sit still whilst eating.

OK so it's easier to chuck foil containers in the bin rather than wash up, but that's not the point.

Ready cooked food is, admittedly getting better, but it's still not the real thing and sadly people never taste the real thing. There's a whole lot of difference between a beautifully home cooked lasagne and the little sticky pile of over salted commercially made stuff even if it says it hasn't got any additives in it. Sadly children frequently prefer the latter because their taste buds have been assaulted since toddlerhood by too much salt and too much sugar to be able to appreciate subtle tastes.

My real bete noire is the word 'fresh'. It's on everything - fresh fish, fresh milk, fresh dairy produce, fresh vegetables. On menus, on supermarket signs, on advertising . What does it mean? Are we supposed to think the stuff they used to sell was not fresh, the previous cod fillets a bit iffy, the milk a bit sour? But now it's all fresh. You might as well say ' not gone off'.

I also dislike anything meant to conjure up a totally false impression of where it was made. Dairy, Farm, Market, Meadow, Little Fishing Village Just Off Padstow'. These are usually trade names, and it is likely that Little Farm in the Hollow of the Big Green Hill is actually a factory making meat pies in Stoke on Trent.

Garden Fresh particularly annoys me because to me garden fresh means walking into the garden at midday and picking a colander full of new peas, taking them to the kitchen and shelling them into a saucepan of boiling water. It doesn't mean a huge mechanical monster trundling down a field of peas, ripping off the pods, taking them back to a factory building, removing the peas by equally brutal mechanical means, blast freezing them sold and stuffing them into a plastic packet before they are distributed to my local supermarket.

Now I've started I can't stop. I haven't even got to people yet. Bigots, racists, people who really ought to get a life instead of moaning about tiny little things, people who generalise and say 'I don't like the French', dismissing a whole nation just because they had a row with an uppity French waiter in 1956 over an extra bottle of plonk.

Oh yes, and slugs. I really hate slugs. I know they're God's little creatures and all that but there's been a mistake somewhere along the line. When I count up all the hours I spend on all the various pleasurable tasks of a gardener and then watch my labours ruined because yet another of the little blighters has somehow managed to get into the greenhouse I get mad.

I can perfectly well understand why people who wouldn't normally hurt a fly can jump up and down on a particularly large slug with glee.

Snails are just as bad, but there's something ever so slightly endearing about them in their little houses.

So I just chuck them down the bottom of the garden and hope they don't hit the stone wall too hard.

I'm off on holiday, where the sun had better be shining, the food won't be coming out of a foil container and everything does tend to be fresh. Especially the waiters. Yippee.