What I Hate about my Life Right Now

• Store cards.

  A few years ago, I had seven store cards, one for every occasion. Now I have nothing but their tiresome legacy: seven store card account bills I am still paying off every month.
  

I went into a popular high-street retail outlet today, to purchase a blue smock-style top recently seen and desired by my teenage daughter. As I reached for my debit card, the sales assistant - her proper job description is probably 'commercial retail technician' or something equally ludicrous - launched into her automatic sales spiel, pushing my need for a store card account. I mentioned my credit history and saw her face darken.

'We have to mention the store card every time a customer pays by another means,' she told me, clearly embarrassed by her own helplessness in this situation. 'It's even written into our contracts now.'

She told me there are New Customer Account targets for individual stores across the UK, and that the pressure to reach those targets is immense. She also said it's becoming an industry-wide requirement in retail, with staff increasingly trained 'how not to take no for an answer' when persuading customers to apply for credit accounts at the till rather than pay by other means.

Considering the spiralling cost of debt in the United Kingdom, the many thousands of families already in trouble, struggling with their over-inflated mortgages, it seems greedy and morally reprehensible to be pushing credit in this shark-like manner.

And with the mimimum payment set at about 10% of the balance and as much as 50% of that amount paying off the interest, it's possible that in thirty years' time, you may find grannies in care homes who are still paying for that pair of diamanté ankle-strap platforms they bought back in 2007.

Besides the issues of morality and social responsibility, I also just loathe having to parry these '15% off all purchases today' onslaughts at the till. Let's face it, buying a simple pair of knickers has become almost as bad as choosing a new fridge and having to face the barrage of 'extras' on offer as you fumble for your Maestro card at the till ...

Why not buy two years' guarantee against accidental damage, or three years' warranty with a free iPod, or just hand over your PIN and we'll throw in a tabletop spindryer ... ?

• Tenancy Fees.

  Through no fault of our own, but because the landlord has decided to sell, we are having to move house this month. We've finally found a property - tiny rooms and hugely over-priced, of course - and are about to 'apply' to rent it. Sounds reasonable, you might think. But the money and logistics involved aren't.

  
  

We haven't changed agencies. In fact, we've been renting from this same agency for four years now. Yet we still have to apply, with all the proper pieces of identification, bank details, pay slips, references etc., as though these people had never seen us before. Rules is rules, apparently.

Then we have to pay - wait for it! - £145 application fee per adult in the household (there are two of us), plus £150 administration fee for the tenancy agreement, plus a month's rent in advance, plus a month's rent as a deposit against damages, plus £200 flat rate deposit for unspecified purposes. Then we have to pay £70 for packaging my books (I have nearly a thousand) and storage costs for the same - roughly £75 per month - as the next house is so small we can't take all of them with us. Then there are the house removal costs themselves, likely to be somewhere in the region of £650.

And there's no guarantee, once we've moved, that our new landlord won't decide to sell in another six months or a year's time and we'll have to rip up our savings account in order to survive another bout of these punitive costs.

• Not Having Time for a Nervous Breakdown.

  With all the nightmarish stuff going on in my life at the moment, I'd really enjoy a nervous breakdown. I already had one in about 2000 - 2001, of course, and I don't want to seem flakey by overdoing it. But being a poet, I'm allowed at least one breakdown every five or so years without incurring too much social disapprobation.

  
  

But I don't have the time right now for a really significant nervous breakdown. Though I could become generally flustered instead. I could adopt the face of a woman on the edge, especially in bank queues. I could even indulge in a little mania late at night. Nothing too heavy, just weeping and perhaps some broken china. But none of that would be as satisfactory as a full-on mental and emotional blow-out.

But no, I have to soldier on with this house move. Roll up my carpets. Take the brown tape by the horns. Keep my chin up and stick it out. Stiffen my upper storey. Throw my heart into the removals van. Die with my boots on. Pack up my troubles in my old tea-chest.

And remember to leave the Valium and Roget's Thesaurus until last.