In lockdown I’m reflecting on my friend who tried to sell me her jacket potato – and other annoyances

She once said, ‘I always felt sad that you and I lost touch.’ Older and bolder, I said, ‘We didn’t lose touch: I couldn’t stay friends with you because you tried to make me pay for your scraps’

Now that life has been cleared of the usual hustle and bustle of work, school and socialising, certain moments of frustration and irritation in my life have waved to me from the shelves I had stored them on and I’ve been taking another peek. So starved am I of adult company, I almost feel nostalgic for every time someone has tutted at me on the Underground for not walking fast enough or told me they are “saving” the four free seats at their table in a busy pub.

I appreciate this last one is controversial. Many of you reading this may “save” seats for friends who are yet to arrive and still consider yourselves as good, thoughtful people. Well, let me tell you, you are the spawn of Beelzebub.

When a fellow human hopefully shuffles to your table, gingerly puts their hand on a chair so as not to be too forward and says, “Is this chair free?” then the answer is “Yes!”, you monster, unless your friend is at the bar, in the loo or chatting up a smoker outside.

How can you even bring yourself to say “No, it’s saved”, when your companion HASN’T EVEN ARRIVED? How did we ever allow this inhuman behaviour to go unchecked? How can you watch that poor person shuffling off, their homeless bottom roaming the pub, desperate for a low, flat surface. (By the by, I never knew I felt quite as strongly as I do about this until just now. Seriously, I may have to go and lie down.)

A pub is a public house and the chairs are for the public who are currently in it. Obviously, I have never said this to a chair-hogger. No need to ruin an evening by having a barney with a stranger over furniture.

It’s almost comforting, in lockdown, to remember things from our other life which irked or upset us long ago. A reminder of how once things were normal and the complaints we had were petty in the scheme of things but gave us a story to tell our friends. I’ve been having flashbacks to a night when a group of people on a work-do in a bar took my bottle of wine from my table when I was in the loo. This happened 10 years ago, I thought I was over it, but in lockdown I’ve learnt that everything is still there, stored to be examined and then put back. I’m fuming. Perhaps we need reminding, because that’s how we have laid the boundaries around the sort of people we permit to stay in our lives and the ones we don’t. You may get on fabulously with someone, be on the same page politically and love the same music, but then their manners are so different to yours that you can’t stay friends.

This week on Twitter, I put up a post asking people to tell me the most tight-fisted things anyone had ever done to them. Mine had been a friend at A-Level college (from a wealthy family and who got an allowance before I even knew what one of those was) trying to sell me a jacket potato that had been half-eaten then disregarded, for 50p. Imagine that. Actually preferring food to go to waste rather than let your hungry, skint friend have it if it meant you got nothing in return. I didn’t have that potato and we didn’t stay friends.

The incident popped into my mind this week and is in the huge pile of “things which still irk me from time to time”. This woman could have gone on to become a Nobel Peace Prize winner, she could have solved all the conflict in the Middle East but to me she will always be the tw** who said, “You can have it but it’s only fair I charge you 50.” I bet she saves a seat in the pub for the one friend she has managed to keep.

I got hundreds of replies from people telling me their own examples of Olympic-level meanness. There were aunts who charged to plait their eight-year-old nieces’ hair, grandparents who cold shouldered a five-year-old grandchild for making, rather than buying, them a present, and endless examples of friends who don’t pay their share in a pub or a restaurant.

Fellow comedian Nick Doody told me the tale of a friend who insisted on a certain pizza restaurant because he had a 50 per cent off voucher. The friend did not split the bill when it came, claiming that the voucher was his so his pizza should be free. Nick paid the lot. What’s baffling about these people is that they regard the money they save more valuable than the friendship they will lose. The leftover potato girl and I bumped into each other at a party a few years ago (she did not win the Nobel prize) and she said, “I always felt sad that you and I lost touch.” Older and bolder, I said, “We didn’t ‘lose touch’, I couldn’t stay friends with you because you tried to make me pay for your scraps.”

I never forget an uneaten potato. And I will track down those goons who stole my wine a decade ago, just as soon as I’m allowed out of the house.