You know Shepherd Book's thing about the special hell reserved for people who talk in the theatre? Forget talking in the theatre! The special hell needs to be reserved for designers who think that fake pockets are a good idea.

Yes, I know I've ranted about this before, but fake pockets? FAKE POCKETS? WHY? I have been told that garments hang better and travel better if pockets are sewn up, so I can perhaps, and very grudgingly, accept that there might be a slight justification for sewing up pockets in garments destined for a life of stardom as a catwalk or catalogue model. But I'm talking about cheap, functional garments that will never look glamorous. I'm talking about garments that don't have pockets at all, merely useless little flaps - not even decorative ones, but boring, barely visible ones - that look as if they belong to pockets, but don't. WHY? WHY? If there was no pocket at all, perhaps I could learn to live with it; I do, after all, possess pocketless skirts and dresses. But why go to the effort of adding a useless little fake pocket opening unless you're doing it purely to deceive and enrage? Your eyes think there's a pocket there. Experience from other trousers tells you there'll be a pocket there. The useless little flap of fabric draws your fingers into it, only to make them come up short.

I have been told that men's trousers are immune from this plague. However, strangely, I have never yet heard a woman say, "Oh, I am SO overwhelmed today. I've got 4 pockets on my trousers, and it's such a lot to think about. If only two of them were fake!"

Give us trousers without pockets for those who want them. Give us trousers with pockets for those who want them. But don't give us trousers that say, "Hey, look at me! I've got 4 lovely pockets!" only to reveal once you've got them home that two of them are WICKED LIES!

And, yes, I KNOW that the moral of this story is "don't hastily buy trousers without checking the pocket situation," and "don't assume that, just because a pair of trousers appears to be UTTERLY IDENTICAL to the pair you bought from the same shop last year, it really IS utterly identical, and hasn't replaced perfectly functional pockets with fakes."

AND while I'm busy ranting about trousers... I'm five foot five and a bit, which is round about the average height for women in the UK. Something is very wrong in the world of women's trousers if trousers marked as "short" are 2 inches too long for me. Last year's pocket-rich well-nigh-identical-but-not pair were also "short" and exactly right. I suspect them of taking the fabric they saved from the pockets and sticking it on the hems.

Today's entirely-unimportant-in-the-scheme-of-things rant subject is automatic doors. More specifically, it's lazy automatic doors that perform their duty but slowly and too late. So there you are, brisk shopper, striding purposefully towards the door. (I always stride purposefully, even if my brain hasn't yet clarified what the purpose actually is. For example, on Thursday I strode purposely into M&S with the purpose of filling a bag with tomato and basil soup and nothing else. Fifteen minutes later, I strode purposefully out again, with a bag full of two pairs of trousers, two bras, 9 tins of soup and a packet of tomatoes, with the purpose of getting out again quick before I ended up buying a kitchen sink.) So, striding purposefully, you near the automatic door, confident that it will part before you and let you through without any check in your gait.

Then, with a few steps to go, you have this horrible realisation that it is not opening. It's doubtless standing there, idling, cigarette in hand, chatting about the pretty girls who have passed through its embrace. Your step falters, but you don't actually stop outright, because automatic doors always open, don't they, and SURELY this one will do so, too. Glass looms large in your vision, and you know that you're going to have to do a full-on emergency stop to save your nose from being squashed. Then, just at the last minute, the door realises you're there, throws away its cigarette, and sloooowly, idly, drifts the doors open with bored ungraciousness, and you can resume your purposeful striding and hope that nobody has noticed that, A, you have almost walked into a door, or, B, you have almost tripped over your own feet as you fought the conflicting urges of "must stop now!" and "carry on; it's bound to be okay."

I could blame the fact that I stride too fast for door technology to cope with. After all, when out walking, I've had random strangers berate me for walking too fast. (It's quite odd. If I'd been tailgating them on narrow paths, I'd understand, but it's people in cottage gardens that I pass, or people yards away on open hillsides who feel the need to tell me off for daring to having different tastes in country walking than they have.) But then there's the other sort of automatic door: the automatic door who is young, new on the job, and very very keen. Approach within ten paces, and the door will leap open, and stand there quivering with the joy of obedience, waiting for you to pat it on their head and tell it that it's been a very good boy. Stand and dither over tomatoes on the fruit and veg section near the door, and it's goes into a positive frenzy of opening and shutting, causing you to look anxiously around for the security guards in case they think you're trying to do a runner with a basket of veg.

Then there are those doors that have a very rigid mind and can only cope with one order at a time. Person A approaches it, and the door parts to let them through. The door then slowly drifts shut again, just as Person B is approaching it. However, the door is concentrating on its "Close now!" order with all its might, and needs to complete this order before it raises its head to look out for new customers. This doesn't normally end well for Person B. The door in our local shop sometimes gets like this. I haven't quite got squashed yet, but it's been a close-run thing.

Actually, come to think it is, it all comes down to magic. When approaching doors, I have a habit of putting my hands together and parting them in a magical way while saying "whoosh" under my breath, so I can pretend that I'm commanding them open with my awesome magic power. However, I only do this accompanied by Pellinor, since there's a limit to how silly I'm prepared to appear in public. However, thinking back, all the problems I've had with lazy or stupid or over-reactive doors have happened when I've been alone and have therefore failed to do the magic hand movements... Hmm... I think the clues are all coming together here, and forcing me to come up with only one conclusion...

Surely I can't be the only person who considers a couch (or similar) to be a vital component of a satisfying hotel room? Unless we're only using the hotel as a place to stay after an evening out, chances are we'll have several hours of an evening in that room, and I hate having to sit on the bed for computer use / TV watching / tea drinking / game playing. I also like somewhere to sit in the morning when I get up before Pellinor's awake.

But do hotel websites ever make it easy to find out if their rooms contain such a thing? No! I've looked at lots of sites where every room is listed separately, with a whole gallery of photos, allowing you to choose which room you want. Even then, they tend to show close-ups of ornaments, arty shots of hanging curtains and so on, but leave you entirely in the dark about what furniture is contained in a room. You can't even assume that this means there is no chair or couch. I've taken a chance on such rooms in the past, only to find that they're large and lovely, with both couch and armchair, even though the many many pictures on the website admitted to neither of these things.

Obviously I want to know how many it sleeps, and whether it's an en suite. I'd like the bed to be comfortable, but that's such a subjective matter than no hotel website can help me here. Tea and coffee making facilities are essential, but are taken as read. (However, if a hotel offers real milk instead of UHT cartons, they should shout about it. I've stayed in hotels that did this, and it was great, but they kept entirely silent about this on their website.) I want to know if there's free wifi - and that, too, is sometimes very hard information to extract from the websites of larger hotel chains. Ideally I'd like to know if it's quiet or not: if the hotel is on a busy road and each room is listed separately, it would be nice to know which rooms are quieter. It's not essential, but given the choice, I'd like a nice view: another thing hotel websites can be strangely coy about, even when they boast about their lovely gardens and setting.

I don't care if there are fluffy bathrobes. Why does every hotel website under the sun make such a thing about fluffy bathrobes?

I don't care what colour the decor is. I don't care who makes the soap; chances are I won't have heard of them, anyway. I don't care what colour the cushions are. I'll just chuck the cushion mountain off the bed as soon as I get there, and the cleaner will carefully pile them all back on again, and I'll chuck them off again. Why are hotels so obsessed with piling a million cushions on the bed? And what's with these funny little coloured strips of material they like to lay across the bottom of the duvet?

I just want to know if I'll have somewhere to sit that isn't the bed. Why are hotels so reluctant to tell me this?

Here's something that's annoying. It's when you get a box of chocolates or a selection box of biscuits, and on the back of the packet it lists all the ingredients for the entire selection, and it reads, "stuff, stuff, stuff, stuff, stuff, THING THAT MIGHT KILL YOU!, stuff, stuff, stuff, stuff, stuff." Inside the box, 20 different chocolates or biscuits stare innocently at you, and you know that at least one of them contains the THING THAT MIGHT KILL YOU! but you have no idea which one(s), or how many. Sometimes one draws your attention by waving dramatically at you, saying LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME! I'M COVERED ALL OVER IN NUTS! but maybe it's just a distraction. Maybe it's like all those people in movies who leap out and shout I AM A DIVERSION! FOLLOW ME SO THE HERO WITH THE McGUFFIN WILL GET AWAY! (and the baddies always fall for it! Why? It's always so obviously a diversion, yet they invariably drop everything and chase after these people who so obviously want to be chased. It's almost as if evil minions are invariably stupid, or something. Oh. Wait.)

Anyway, back to those innocent chocolates. One of them obviously has nuts all over it, and another has no obvious nuts, but is called "hazelnut crunch," which is a bit of a clue. But what about all the others? THING THAT MIGHT KILL YOU! was quite high on the ingredient list. Are two chocolates likely to account for it, or is there likely to be more lurking in a third chocolate, invisible and unlabelled?

In the end, you have to pass all doubtful chocolates to a tame Pellinor, who has to take a careful bite and report back on the likelihood of nuts. But can you trust such a creature? There is, after all, that incident in Bella Pasta in Oxford in 1993: that never-to-be-forgivenforgotten incident when you were suddenly stuck with Doubt about the white shavings on your pudding, so passed it over to him to take a tiny spoonful and report back. Then you got distracted by conversation with others, and when you turned back, the whole pudding was gone. "So it did have nuts in it?" you say. "No," says the brazen-faced unrepentant villain, quite cheerfully. "It was white chocolate."

Okay, so nuts won't actually kill me (at least, they haven't yet) but an allergic reaction is unpleasant and not nice, and there's always the fear that it will get worse. Others have it far, far worse, of course. So why, if you're going to make the effort of listing all your allergens in bold on the back of your packet, don't you make it clear inside which item contains said allergen, and which ones are free of it?

I've just come across one of those books in which some Opinionated Person rants about the way "people nowadays" use language. You see, after many centuries of evolution, the English language coincidentally reached its pinnacle of perfection on this man's eighteenth birthday, and all change since then is wrong and bad.

The page I opened at random was ranting about tautology. It is nonsensical (and wrong and bad) to say, "I'm currently at my desk," he declared, because the present tense is already implied by the verb. However, to me, there is a definite difference between, "Tim is Lord of All Hamsters," and, "Tim is currently Lord of All Hamsters." The latter suggests that Lord of All Hamsters is a distinctly temporary title, and if you come back in a year, you might find Tim's furry nemesis wielding the bejewelled feeding bottle of power, and Tim reduced to sawdust and memory.

"Delays due to an earlier accident," is also condemned as nonsensical (and wrong and bad.) "Well, it can't be because of a future accident," the author scoffs. To me, though, "delays due to an accident," and, "delays due to an earlier accident," are different. The latter suggests that the worst is past, although the effects of the earlier chaos have not yet fully dissipated.

Worst of all, in the Opiniated Person's view, was, "next year, we intend to make further enhancements to our service." He could not even begin to conceive how it was possible to make further enhancements to something. "Um, perhaps because they want to make clear that they've already improved the service in the past?" I shouted (silently) at him.

At this point, I closed the book, and stepped quietly away. It felt wiser thus.

I've posted before about how children's non-fiction publishing is almost entirely based around the school curriculum. "Leisure interest" books such as Scary Animals With Teeth!, HUGE trucks, Ahhh!they'resocuuuuuteandfurries and football are exempt, but history and science books, in particular, are published entirely with the curriculum in mind. Tudors are done in year 4, where they do Henry VIII and Rich & Poor in Tudor England, so there are no books on Tudors for 5 year olds or 12 year olds, and nothing for anyone at all on Elizabeth I.

Obviously, this is all very unfortunate for the 6 year old child who conceives a mad, burning enthusiasm for Tudors. It is also very unfortunate for schools and libraries when the curriculum goes and changes, and you find yourself staring at 450 books on Tudors for 9 year olds, when Tudors Aren't Done now, and all everyone wants is books on the Stone Age for 6 year olds.

Yes, the Stone Age. Primary School children now start history at the Stone Age, and work through the Bronze Age and the Iron Age until they finally reach Vikings by 11 - although they do depart from this chronology to do certain other themes and projects along the way. Unfortunately, the Stone Age hasn't been done in school for years, and there are literally NO BOOKS on it. Despite the fact that the new curriculum was announced a good while back, and went live in September, there are still NO BOOKS on it. This is causing considerable angst and despair in all quarters.

Personally, I can't really see what They were thinking to start the children off on the Stone Age. The previous curriculum started them off gently by introducing the concept of the past, and the fact that Things Were Sometimes Different Then, focusing on things like toys, houses, clothes etc.

But now children have to launch straight in to what is, in my opinion, a very hard period to understand. I still remember the shock of going from 19th century history for A-level (which is not at all my favourite, but it's what I was landed with, since apparently only Bad Boys did my preferred choice of the Renaissance) to the Anglo-Saxon invasions in my first term at Oxford. It was so hard to go from a period where documentary evidence abounds, to a period when we know so very little, and have to piece it together from archaeological finds and dubious documentary sources. Each new archaeological find could potentially overturn everything we thought we knew. How on earth do you teach this to 5 year olds?

Today's rant is about automatic taps in public toilets. I do understand that these have been put in to protect our newly-washed hands from having to touch the tap to turn it off, thus contaminating ourselves with the assorted nasties that were on the hands of the hundreds of people who have turned it on before us. However, the magical touch-free sensor approach is REALLY ANNOYING because it HARDLY EVER WORKS!

You approach the line of sinks, and wave your hands under one of the taps. Nothing happens. You move them nearer and wave them again, then further away. Still nothing. You wave fast, then slow. You do the hokey-cokey and you turn around. Still nothing. You intone magical incantations. You speak "friend." Still nothing, so you move to the next tap, and repeat the process, and continue down the line.

Sometimes you never find the way to persuade the mute and merciless tap to dispense its bounty. But sometimes - how, you do not know and never will - you accidentally hit on precisely the right method to summon the water. Did you put your hands at the precise 3.57 inch distance that is demanded? Was it something to do with the speed you danced the hokey-cokey? Either way, you suddenly have a huge gush of water... all over your cuffs, nowhere near your hands. It cannot be replicated.

Or sometimes, you get presented with a single hole in the wall, that dispenses soap, water and air in a pre-arranged sequence that cannot be interrupted. There will inevitably be far fewer of these things than there are toilet cubicles. The ones I queued (im)patiently for today were branded as "Wallgate," which sounds like some terrible wall-related scandal. This is apt. The machines insisted on dispensing what felt like two hours supply of air. Even customers who wanted to erase every last hint of dampness from their hands ended up walking away while the air was still blasting out, causing the next person to stand there, twitchy with impatience, waiting for the chance to wave their hands wildly in the void, mutter magical words, and be rewarded with a jet of soap on their cuffs.

Grump! I've been using the MapMyWalk app on my phone since January, and have used it to track over 200 walks, ranging from less than a mile to over 30 miles. Barring a few issues with battery use, I've had no problems with it.

Last week, I installed a big upgrade...

After a week of fighting with it, I have had to conclude that the upgrade has made the app unusable on my phone. I don't know if this is because my phone, although less than a year old, is at the budget end of the Smartphone spectrum? I've only managed one successful walk, and that was a simple A to B walk in Southampton, only 2 miles, with no pauses. Otherwise, it refuses to start again when paused. It shouts about not being able to connect to their website - something it never previously moaned about, which is just as well, given the lack of network coverage one tends to encounter on country walks. It sometimes freezes up completely, forcing me to restart my phone. It devours battery life at least twice as fast as the old one, if not more, even when paused.

Yes, I am using the free version of the app, rather than paying to get the more advanced version. I accept that this gives me very limited right to complain. I am not a paying customer, and they owe me nothing. But I'm still grumped about it. I'm 88% of the way through my "walk 1000 miles" target on MapMyWalk, so I don't want to move away from it until I've completed that. I can map walks manually - easy when you walk on roads; rather more challenging when you go cross country - but it's so much easier to have a magic device in your pocket doing all the counting for you.

Grump!

Has anyone else found that modern bags have mastered the art of being far, far bigger on the outside than the inside? I've noticed it with new suitcases and a new handbag, but it's particularly noticeable with our new small rucksack.

The old one had a single compartment, with two outer pockets on the side for drink bottles. It worked well enough, but I wanted to get one with a chest strap - I was often reduced to walking along with my thumbs hooked into the straps, trying to replicate a chest strap, but I did generally feel that I ought to be singing cowboy songs while doing it. I also wanted some sort of contraption that would keep the bag off my back, thus avoiding the unpleasantness of the sodden back scenario. Most annoyingly, the zips on the side pockets gradually work open, and more than once I stopped for lunch, only to find that my water bottle had made a successful escape bid miles back along the track.

So, anyway, we bought a new small rucksack that had all those things I wanted, including pockets that could keep even the most determined water bottle from escaping. All well and good, thus far. However, when came to use it, we found that it doesn't actually hold anything! The contraption that keeps it off the back seriously reduces its expansion possibilities, but that's fair enough. However, it's divided into so many mini compartments and pockets that you can't really fit anything into any of them. The biggest compartment can't quite hold our insulated sandwich bag when it holds sandwiches for two, plus an ice pack. It can just hold said bag when it has sandwiches for one, but only with a bit of squashing and squeezing and heaving at the zip. The second biggest compartment can just hold one folded up lightweight waterproof. I've found 9 separate compartments thus far, and we spent quite a bit of our round-the-island walk desperately zipping and unzipping, trying to track down the compartment that held the cereal bars/external battery/map.

How can something billed as having a 20 litre capacity struggle with holding lunch for two and two lightweight waterproofs?

(Dried) Egg pappardelle, "bySainsbury's" (ingredients: durum wheat semolina, free range egg (16%)): kcal per 100g: 372

(Dried) "Pappardelle made with free range eggs," Sainsbury's Taste the Difference (ingredients: durum wheat semolina, free range egg (24%)): kcal per 100g: 141

Something does not compute here! One would expect a slightly higher egg content to make some difference to the calorie content, but not this much.

But the plot thickens. Version 1 claims that a serving is 100g. Version 2 claims that a serving is 200g. Presumably, in version 1, 100g refers to dry weight, whereas in version 2, is refers to cooked weight, with the weight doubled by water. Nowhere is this made clear. And, in this case, version 2 is particularly unhelpful to me as I stand there with my weighing scales, measuring out a sensible portion size, since if I do it without measuring, it always balloons into enough to feed a hungry army. I don't often cook dried pasta, so can never remember what's a sensible portion size, so I could very easily have measured out 200g of dried pasta per person today, were it not for the fact that I still had a tiny bit left of the old packet left, and could compare.

I do appreciate nutritional information on food, but sometimes they seem to go out of their way to obscure what they really mean. Grump!