Do you know what really sucks? Living in Munchkinland. It’s a pain if you’re over six feet tall, to be cracking your head on the fittings, to sit in chairs that are too short at tables that are somewhere around your ankles when you stand up. A lifetime of furniture built for the pygmy throwbacks that make Dwarves look like basketball players has left me with a permanent stoop.

Thanks to this stoop, I frequently get the cheerful advice to “Stand up straight, stop being all hunched up!” This usually makes me feel like punting the little bugger who says so across the room. Some of them have then nerve to accuse me of trying to hide my height. I like being tall! The problem is, no one else wants me to be tall. They say I should stand up, be tall, but talk is cheap - the entire world is built to make me suffer. Physical pain is apparently not supposed to be part of people’s lives, yet its part of mine. I’m starting to think the midgets secretly enjoy it.

Once I was in a library, and went upstairs to the mezzanine floor to get a book. I realized that the railing was so low that I could trip over it, yet because the Munchkins are morons, the second floor was high enough to kill me if I fell over the side. What kind of midgets build things like this? Idiot midgets, that’s who.

These same idiot midgets have the nerve to ask me why I don’t wear clothes that fit. My sleeves stop an inch or two short of my wrists despite the rest of the top fitting, and so I look like some kind of senile, hopeless crone who can’t pick the right sized things out in the store (criticism of my preference for a monochrome wardrobe from a population who dress like circus clowns is something else I do not appreciate, but it is a minor annoyance compared to living in a land where I smack my head into the roof of the bus when I rise from the too-small seat at my stop). I will not go into details about the problems with shoes, lest my wrath spill over and I instigate a reign of terror.

Munchkinland is full of trees lining the footpaths, and the people who prune these trees like to have the branches hanging low to make a leafy awning – an awning so low that I have my hair pulled out when it gets caught in the clawlike branches as I crouch down to pass underneath. Clearly I need a proper hat to deflect the spindly tree-talons. I saw a stylish, wide-brimmed pointy one that looks like it will do the job nicely the other day. I think I’ll buy it.