For no one reason in particular, today has been a bit of a pain in the arse.

I got out of bed, as they say, on the wrong side. Since waking, I’ve been dealing with a plethora of small annoyances, and it’s really soured my day.

I left the apartment, to find one of our neighbours had just dumped their takeaway meal bags out on the corridor. All the leftover Chinese food and associated wrappers had been sweating there all night. The stink was revolting.

I then went down 35 floors (in a lift, I’m not completely mad) before realising I’d left my AirPods back upstairs in the apartment. Cue a long wait to get back upstairs, then grab them, and start my journey to work all over again.

Minutes later, I was on a cramped DLR – owing in no small part to the rail strike – and had to listen to very loud ‘on hold’ music coming from a woman’s phone. For the entire journey. When challenged (not by me) she just said “I’m on hold”, as if having your mobile on speakerphone (loudly) on a packed public transit was a totally normal and appropriate thing to do.

I got to my office building to find someone had cooked and/or heated something foul in the microwave, leaving a sickly, sour smell permeating the whole floor. It made my mouth water – but not in a good way.

A little later, someone decided to lean against my office door while they made a complaint call to their mobile phone company. Why yes, it was on speakerphone.

Was any one of these things a disaster? Not in the slightest. But taken together, it lead to a cacophony of sighs, inward groans and shaking of the head.

As the concierge in my apartment building said this morning “Some people just don’t know how to behave in a community” and I couldn’t agree more.

I have one more meeting to attend and then I’m drawing a line under today. I have a nice dinner to prepare and an episode of The Mandalorian to catch up on.

Tomorrow will be a fresh start. Or I’ll simply turn into Michael Douglas in Falling Down and you’ll hear all about it on the news.