They say you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. Perhaps that’s why Cruft’s winners rarely get inducted into the Magic Circle.
But I’ve proved that old saying untrue because I’ve recently learned an expression I’d never heard before – ‘Shovel List’.
Most of us have a ‘bucket list’ and as the years pass, various plans and ambitions on it will, if we’re lucky, be ticked off once they’re achieved.
However, some things on a bucket list, like . . . sky diving naked into an Olympic-size swimming pool filled with lemon jelly, should, if we’re even luckier, have a thick pencil line drawn through them, once we’ve realised they’re completely unachievable, totally impractical and not a little stupid. Especially once we’ve discovered we’re allergic to lemon jelly.
Incidentally, a shovel list has nothing to do with the never-officially-clarified social etiquette of whether we should or shouldn’t clear away the snow from the pavement immediately outside our abodes. Always a tricky one, that.
No, it’s a list of the people and things that annoy us so much we could cheerfully smack them in the face with a shovel.
And before I get accused of ‘toxic masculinity’, it’s a metaphorical expression coined by writer Marion Keyes in her 2012 novel The Mystery Of Mercy Close.
Some of the things on her list are clowns and ventriloquists and Brits who say “Chunk of change” or “Here’s the deal”.
I found several websites sharing who or what they’d put on their shovel list and ironically, the review of MS Keyes book on the website of a famous glossy woman’s magazine contained two annoyingly abbreviated words which I’d definitely have on my shovel list.
It read “We recommended it ‘Abs’” and “We think it’s ‘Amaze!”
Also on my shovel list would be that irritating Radio 2 daytime presenter who refers to his callers as ‘Guys’; people who listen to music on their phones in public without earphones; politicians who don’t answer the flippin’ question asked; and any official who says after they’ve spectacularly messed up “Lessons must be learned!”
Let me know who’s on your shovel list…as long as it’s not me!