Reasons why Fran may yet be modelling for a magazine

Noises that annoy ...

1. It's windy outside tonight, and the metal flap over our letterbox clink-clink-clinks. It's a tinny sound, as though someone's standing on our door mat, playing the triangle, only badly. Sometimes I take the letterbox flap off to avoid the clinking, but instead we get a Force 9 gale whistling through it like a banshee on acid and nipping up our trouser legs when we walk down the hall. I'll take the clinking, thanks. No one's nipped up my trouser legs for years and they're not going to start now.

2. My husband is a Pressure Cooker Man. Maybe it's a macho thing, to have a stew steaming and hissing and spitting on the stove, instead of bubbling with contentment on Gas 4 for a few hours in the oven.  It's violent cookery, like rugby, only with cubes of stewing steak and half a pound of carrots and onions. But it's the hissing I can't take - it lifts up the top layer of my skin and gets under it. My husband shuts all the doors, and I sit in a far-away room, but I can still hear it, sussurating away - a meal with a Lisp.

3. The intrusive whine of aeroplanes overhead makes me flinch. We moved from Greater London to Warwickshire partly because of Aeroplanes Overhead. We lived near Heathrow and when the wind was in a certain direction and the planes ventured low, lower, lower, over our house, we could see the screws holding the undercarriage together. If we were eating, peas danced on our plates.  In fact, at times, the noise was so loud, it vibrated through my whole body to the extent that I nearly needed something to hold my own undercarriage together. There's never been a case of a uterine prolapse caused by low-flying aircraft, but I've always wanted to be a model in a magazine, and the British Medical Journal will do, seeing as Vogue hasn't rung me yet.

Maybe I was doing this when Vogue rang. Dammit.