It's good to talk. But sometimes it's even better to seethe.

I know we are not supposed to keep things bottled up these days; we are supposed to talk our problems out and let our feelings roam wild and unfettered like emotional free-range chickens. But occasionally I have to admit I still enjoy letting a niggle brew for a while.

It starts off as something petty and inconsequential. Then I start to ponder the situation and to prod repeatedly at the problem - you see, it started as a petty niggle and it's already a full-blown problem - and before you know it I have a searing hot ball of pure, unadulterated anger bubbling and brewing nicely in the pit of my stomach.

For me, this is the emotional equivalent of choosing a nice bottle of wine, something full, ripe and with just a hint of charred exhaust pipe, over a vat of cheap plonk.

I could pop my cork - or indeed, carefully unscrew my plastic moulded cap - over every little niggle that came my way. But the enjoyment I would receive would be measly and fleeting.

If, on the other hand, I let the niggle ferment for a while, allowing the emotional flavour to evolve into something that will make my toes curl and my hair stand on end even more than usual, then the climactic cork-popping is nothing less than Edinburgh Castle on New Year's Eve.

So, prepare yourselves for some fireworks - and maybe even a few cannon blasts, fired across the night sky by unsettlingly hairy men in skirts - because I have had this one brewing for a while.

Littering. Littering. And once more with feeling: LITTERING.

I know this isn't exactly on a par with the war in Iraq, but it still gets my goat, ties it to the back of a Ford Mondeo and drives at 90mph along the A64.

There are few things in my day-to-day life that make me shout at strangers in the street, but littering is one of them. The other is if I think they look like George Clooney, but seeing as I only shout "Corrr!", I don't suppose it counts.

When I say "shout", what I actually mean is "mutter to myself like a bag lady who has lost her favourite trolley". The other day as I was driving down Burton Stone Lane, I stuck my head out of the window and muttered incoherently at a passing cyclist. Just days before I had thrown a vicious mutter at a man in the car park at Asda, continuing to mutter to myself and my poor children all the way around the store.

But what, you may ask, did these poor individuals do to merit such negative attention?

Well, I'll tell you.

The first was glugging a plastic bottle of milk as he cycled along. When his thirst was quenched, he lobbed the bottle across the road and on to the pavement.

The second was giving his two squealing, over-heated kids cartons of liquid tooth-rot. After strapping his offspring into the car which, of course, was the size of a tank and had bull-bars plastered across the front, he pulled the cartons from his carrier, ripped open the packaging and threw in on the floor. He then passed two of the drinks to the kids, downed a third himself, squeezed the carton into a ball and chucked that on the floor too.

I could barely contain myself. If I hadn't been such a card-carrying woolly liberal - and British to boot - I should have knocked the cyclist off his bike and into the nearest litter bin, and rammed the dad's head firmly between his own bull-bars. Instead I had to make do with muttering and seething.

Thankfully, however, my five-year-old son has no such qualms about calling a spade a spade and a litterbug a litterbug. While I mutter and seethe, he point and shouts. "Look at that man," he says in that loud stage whisper that only children and minor characters in Coronation Street can pull off. "A bird might eat that plastic and fall down out of the sky dead."

A little dramatic perhaps, and unfortunately as ineffective as my muttering, but at least he has his say. Maybe if we all pointed and shouted, they might actually get the message.

Updated: 11:13 Monday, June 21, 2004