Everyone has a hobby. Whether it’s Joan Barfoot novels, Springsteen lyrics or cultivating snakeshead fritillaria (I do all three, the last without success). But there’s nothing like boycotting.

And oh, I am good. Because I shop with the grit and joy usually restricted to marathon runners, any firm I boycott suffers financial harm even before I warn my friends. And since shopping comes naturally to me, as instinctual as “beautiful, useful, well-priced, I’ll take it,” I can apply my intellect to boycotting.

Category 1: Entertainers.

I refuse to buy any music made by already rich corporate shills. Not only do I bypass new CDs from Sheryl Crow (Panasonic TV), Sir Mick Jagger (Jovan, Tatler-style bootlicking) and Diana (Chrysler) Krall and DVDs from Kiefer (Voice of Ford) Sutherland, I throw out their old ones. Then there’s Sir Paul McCartney (Fidelity Investments, British Royal Family), whom I always despised for being rude about John Lennon, the talented one who made Mr. McCartney famous and who died in a shooting so hideous that the sounds of his bones cracking from the bullets echoed through the Dakota that night. Mr. McCartney’s CDs make a similar sound when I split them in half.

So when the news came that Mr. McCartney was giving the first live space concert, I roared with joy. Do it, Paul. Get in the Space Shuttle WinceyPopstars, shoot into another galaxy and sing, “I’m a bluebird I’m a bluebird yeah yeah yeah” until NASA interrupts with news that the insulation was glued on with Elmer’s, so you have a choice: Burn up on re-entry or just warble about bluebirds until you die.

Then I discovered that McCart was going to sing on Earth to a bunch of astronauts in space. He wasn’t even getting on an airplane. I am so steamed.

Category 2: The Corporation.

a) Amex. Explaining why I won’t use the American Express card would take a book (in fact, someone wrote it). It involves Amex’s former chairman, James Robinson, and a banker named Edmond Safra, a Wall Street tale that ends in a horrible death eerily like the one I just wished on McCart. b) Wal-Mart. Will never enter one so boycott pathetic, but still.

Category 3: Scenes of danger.

A year ago, I took a prescription to my local Shoppers Drug Mart. I thought the guy, an assistant pharmacist, was odd even then. He leaned over the counter as he explained the perfectly simple prescription (eat with Rolaids) and stared at me intently, like Damien in The Omen. I could feel his breath.

This July, I went in to pick up some skin cream. “Are you the woman who writes things?” the same man yelled. I stared. He continued shouting at me (about my column stating that religious, anti-sex pharmacists are still obliged to follow the law and provide morning-after pills). The entire store fell silent. I saw real hatred in his eyes. I left.

I called the pharmacy owner the next day. He was courtesy and kindness itself, but there was little he could do to protect me from Old Yeller. Now I have to travel downtown to Shoppers, dammit.

Category 4. Weirdos.

I take calls from my husband’s cellphone company because I love him. But this firm, apparently not on speaking terms with itself, calls twice a day. The first call threatens to send out a collection agency. The second call is from a call centre in what sounds like Kentucky, with a sad teenager begging me to renew said phone contract. I take the first call for thrills, the second out of liberal guilt.

Category 5: Incompetence so honed that you don’t ask for a refund, you save it for the column.

I was attacked by squirrels. They began chewing my window screens in such a frenzy that I woke up terrified, closed the windows and then ran to each window at the back of the house to find the same squirrel on each sill.

It was like Hitchcock’s The Birds, except it was squirrels, there was just the one and who’d pitch a horror movie called The Squirrel? But what with all the screaming, it was identical. There was an awful moment in the bathroom when I closed the window too fast (don’t do this) and the rodent was trapped between the window and the screen. I was hysterically searching for a scalpel (no, of course I don’t own a scalpel, but I do have a nail file) and it all ended badly, for me and the screen, but tragically not for the squirrel. Are they really a protected species? I hear they make good eatin’.

I am boycotting the window shop I asked to fix my screens. I should have replaced the screens myself as Martha Stewart did a segment on that, but I was lazy.

They shrank the frames. I didn’t even know metal could shrink. So I went back, against my better judgment, and said, “Here’s an unchewed window screen in its perfectly sized frame. See if you can get the screens back to the original size. Also your netting is baggy.”

They allegedly tried. The screens were now too big. I ended up hammering them into the frames while sealing the shrunken baggy bits at the corners with white electrical tape.

Meanwhile, the squirrels are literally eating my deck. I have that now-banned old-fashioned decking soaked in arsenic or possibly cyanide (Is that bitter almonds I smell?). All I want for Christmas is a pile of dead squirrels.

If I don’t get it, I’m boycotting squirrels. Not sure how to go about this.

P.S. There’s a Category 6, but I’m holding back out of hope that human decency will prevail in the British newspaper industry. Sounds of derisive laughter, as Monty Python used to say.