That’s it! Enough’s enough! I’ve separated my last pair of Siamese-twin teabags by tearing them apart at that precarious perforated seam that joins them. If a manufacturer can’t be bothered to sell me a pack of 50 teabags that are ready for use straight from the box without need for separation surgery, then you know what? I can no longer be bothered to buy that brand of tea. How hard can it be for a factory — having already filled precise pockets of filter paper with measured quantities of tea leaves — to complete the job by making that final neat snip that delivers us 50 individual teabags rather than 25 fiddly pairs of Siamese twins?

Actually, it took me a while to realise that there even were two teabags joined into one. For a long time I just assumed that the manufacturer had strengthened the recipe so that the bag brewed tea so dense you could use leftovers in the teapot to regrout your garden paving.

This shifting of the burden of work from the provider of goods to the consumer began stealthily. Grocer’s shops in which staff sold you flour and jams from behind countertops gave way to fill-your-own basket supermarkets. Now those supermarkets are dispensing with checkouts, making you scan your own trolleyful of groceries before operating the credit-card machine yourself. Garages watched and learnt: they stopped filling your petrol tank and left you to squeeze the pump trigger yourself. Some restaurants dropped waiters from their payroll, handed you a tray and told you to serve yourself. Furniture stores that once sold whole, solid items began to just sell you interlocking pieces of wood that you had to carry home and assemble yourself into bookshelves that ended up most closely resembling a sculpture by Sir Anthony Caro. Utility companies stopped sending people to read your meter and made you read it for them instead; or, by way of an alternative, face an electricity bill with an estimated reading (using the word “estimated” in its sense of “we’re assuming you’ve swapped your table lamps for stadium floodlighting”).

Now, The Sunday Times reports that scientists are developing a gym where everything from the electric treadmills to the TVs that gym-users watch while exercising will run on the energy expended on those treadmills and rowing machines by the fee-paying members of that gym. So, soon you will be doing the gym-owners’ work for them as well. And, really, why should it stop there? Next you’ll be pedalling furiously under your desk to generate the juice to run your office computer, or to stop your office plunging into darkness, in order to trim your boss’s electricity bill. If everyone’s pedalling sufficiently hard to keep the company’s computers working, and the office lights blazing, we’ll just siphon off any excess electricity to our branch offices. (Colleague: “Why are you still pedalling when the computers and lights are all working?” You: “I’m powering the photocopier in our Boston subsidiary.”) Why do we let ourselves be pushed around like this, doing all this extra work for other people all day long? We now check ourselves in at airports. Restaurants are smitten by tapas cuisine: it’s now the diner’s responsibility to work out a combination of dishes, textures and flavours that might work together. Tapas are snacks, for Pete’s sake! In Spain they hand them out free in bars when you order a glass of wine. It’s not the basis for a £60ahead dinner. At £60 a head the chef should be using his skill to choose for you what goes with what. You’ve come to relax and have a good time, not to play an upmarket version of Ready, Steady, Cook .

In hotels it’s now your duty to leave a message on your bed to alert the chambermaid if you want your sheets changed (and to get branded an eco-lout). To obtain a fresh set of towels you have to remember to throw your used towels on the hotel bathroom floor as a signal to housekeeping. This is just one step short of housekeeping leaving you a note that reads: “If you want clean sheets and towels, wash them yourself, Mister Planet-Polluter!” Watching television used to be relaxing. Now it’s work. Press the red button. E-mail your photos if you witnessed anything newsworthy! Choose whom to evict to make the next episode of the show more interesting. No! You are the highly paid TV executive. You decide whom to dump from the cast in order to make the next episode more entertaining. We’re too busy pedalling to keep the image on the screen from flickering and dying.

On top of everything else, we now must save the planet in our spare time as well. We are all personally responsible for our carbon footprint. Al Gore, for instance, is setting an heroic example by storing one third of the world’s daily output of landfill waste inside his own body. Reluctant to fly needlessly, Gore is also probably not jetting off to faraway places such as Africa for his holidays; which may be just as well because his girth would make him the focus of interest to local game hunters.

I’m hell going to mad as and I’m not it any more take! There’s a sentence in there; but now it’s your job to arrange the words in the correct order. I’m too busy tearing teabags apart.

Cosmic fun when time hangs heavily

An Italian paraglider was found stuck fast in a giant beech tree near Florence, where he’d spent three days and nights hanging upside down. His survival was hailed as a miracle. On the plus side, there are many reasons to be cheerful when hanging upside down:

1The ski-slope graph of the stock market’s recent movement now looks as if share prices are soaring. You feel very rich!

2 Facing heavenwards is perfect for blue-sky thinking.

3 You could end up 2in taller after your ordeal, and thus look that much more elegant in this season’s slimmer-silhouetted suits.

4Now you know what it really feels like to be Batman. Not so hot after all, eh?

5 You come to think of that great explorer as Scott of the Arctic.

6 When you spot a plane flying “below” you you feel thrilled because that means you must be hovering at 40,000ft.

7 Jackson Pollock’s paintings still look like Jackson Pollock paintings.

8 Britney Spears appears to have not a shaven head but a stubbly lantern jaw.

9 Even upside down, Finnegans Wake makes little sense; which is reassuring.

10 George Galloway looks as if he’s talking out of his backside.

Highs and lows

A friend, returning from a fabulous holiday in India, managed to get an upgrade to fly in business, thereby sparing himself, he noted, the familiar challenges of cattle class. Hang on. Considering he was flying on an Indian airline, and given the sacred status of cows in India, wouldn’t “cattle class” be the name for an Indian carrier’s swish first-class compartment?