Screams by Ysenda Maxtone Graham (Abacus £14.99, 208pp)

What drives you the most about modern life?

Being put on hold by a company that wouldn’t help you even if you waited for years?

Boast round robin Christmas messages?

Need to use a parking app?

Do you remember your passwords – or rather, have you forgotten them?

A mouthful of electric bikes?

Enormous heat pumps?

Kisses from strangers on emails?

Unisex pants?

Barren, paved front gardens?

Or all of the above – and more?

Welcome to the world of Ysenda Maxtone Graham. She begins with “January Screams,” then takes us through each month, listing, with trademark wit and wit, those stings of irritation that can make the most easily lose their will to live.

In February, she’s stunned by the oversharing on social media: “”Some personal news to share” — so posts a woman you’ve never heard of, excited to announce she’s been promoted to a job you’ve never heard of in -an organization you’ve never heard of. She could have added the weird emotional pressure of adding crying emojis to strangers’ sad Facebook posts.

March takes delight in “baiting the satnav” – you know, rejecting the route he’s chosen for you, so he crosses and orders you to make a U-turn. I loved that – and also her mockery of the regular train torture of hearing that disembodied voice say “See, Say, Fix”.

She asks, with deep seriousness, “Has anyone ever seen it and said it—and been solved?” I’ll ponder that the next time the Great Western Railway ads drive me crazy.

As you journey with the author through her year of ubiquitous modern annoyances, you begin to realize that some of these things are actually less funny. Have you ever been held up by someone who has their theater tickets or supermarket receipts buried in their smartphone but can’t find them? This is yet another example of how devices have taken over us to become a piece of us – swallowing your cherished photos (another “scream”) as well as your independence.

The Scream by Edvard Munch, 1893

When the government announces it is going to “ban” something, Maxtone Graham considers it “a strange, sad, emotionally charged moment”. If you are against the ban? You have no power, so you have to absorb it, as they say. The word “ban” is short, but “carries with it acres of painful future loss.” Too right!

The tyranny of cancellation culture is also extremely serious, and the author treats us to a rare fight: “All you would pray for in your miserable, isolated, canceled exile would be for cancelers to be canceled themselves because they canceled you”. Who wouldn’t support that?

And in this age of rather undemocratic ‘green’ milibandism, she is brave enough to take on the ‘strange stillness of traffic-free town centres’, with their shuttered shops and ‘sad, echoing’ emptiness, which is ‘a fanatical county councillor’s idea of ​​paradise urban’. “It feels like Prague in 1981, with musty second-hand clothes and unwanted cut-glass fruit begging for attention in shop windows.”

Underlying this little book of squibs is the uneasy feeling that the loudest cry of protest should be about our very limited freedom of speech and choice.

Screams is as sharp as Holly and as bright as fairy lights. Gleefully decorated by Nick Newman’s cartoons, it’s bound to find its way into many a Christmas stocking – having been ‘gifted’ (another ‘scream’ – the noun used as a verb) by kindred spirits.

Together you can drown your sorrows by sharing Ysenda Maxtone Graham’s points out loud over a few glasses of wine in a cheerful mood of exasperated feelings.