Where is Rowena?

In the interests of fairness, I will admit that you have a tough act to follow. Your predecessors were delightful, and had one of the cutest cats I've ever met. I was very upset when I found out they were buying their own place and moving away, no matter how happy for them I pretended to be.

Nevertheless, I'm open-minded and generally predisposed to liking people. And when I found out you had two puppies, I was delighted. I love dogs. I really love small energetic baby dogs. Every time I came home I hoped I would bump into you and one or both dogs, and maybe even get to pet them. But now we're several months into sharing a building with each other, and I have seen them both many times, and I have one main questions for you:

Why are your dogs so gross and loud?

I could forgive one or the other. Some people like scrawny little rat dogs; I lived in Italy long enough to come to terms with this fact. I could definitely deal with the disappointment of not finding your dogs cute if I could then just forget they existed. In the same way, I could also forgive the incessant barking that I hear every hour of every day through the living room floor if I knew it was coming from something adorable. But it's not. It's coming from one of your gross rat dogs.

How can we solve this problem? Ideally, I would like you to trade them in for a more adorable breed – perhaps a pair of golden retrievers, or corgis – but I realise that you have most likely bonded with these specific piles of hair and are therefore reluctant to give them up. With this in mind, I instead request that you find some way of silencing them, at least during evenings and weekends when I am at home. There must be a safe way of sedating dogs. In the absence of a veterinarian willing to advise based on pesky "ethical concerns", let Google be your guide.

Yours grouchily,

Rowena

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Dear people with mullets,

Genuine question: do you just not realise that what you have is a mullet, or are you completely cut off from conventional society? Because it's pretty common knowledge that you can't have those anymore.

I did briefly consider a third possibility, which was that you think the hairstyle looks good enough that you're willing to ignore the fact that it is not longer socially acceptable, but this thought seems so unlikely to occur in a healthy human mind that I immediately dismissed it.

Yours confusedly,

Rowena

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Dear whoever comes up with Snapchat filters,

Let me be very clear that, overall, I think you're doing a great job. I'd pretty much forgotten Snapchat existed until you started allowing me to essentially carry a funhouse mirror around in my pocket with me. I thoroughly enjoy using your app to remove my nose, see how my friends and I look with each other's faces, have a flock of butterflies nesting on my head, and become Kanye West.

With the fact that I am a fan of yours in mind, can you please create a filter that smooths my skin without making me look like a completely different person? Sometimes I don't want my friends to know that my chin got lonely and decided to grow a few smaller chins to keep itself company, but I would quite like them to still recognise me. Maybe you think everyone looks better with bigger eyes, a smaller jaw, and a nose the width of a matchstick, but personally I'm quite happy with my face as is. A filter that removes my spots without also removing half of my jawbone would be wonderful.

Yours expectantly,

Rowena

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Dear people who don't know when to use "less" and when to use "fewer",

Let me start by reassuring you that I'm not going to be horrible about people who get things wrong. I did my time as an insufferable language pedant, and I learned that people don't tend to think you're a cool, fun person to be around if you keep telling them they can't use an apostrophe properly. English is a complex and often illogical language, and it's unreasonable to expect people to learn its ins and outs unless their ignorance is limiting their ability to communicate, or they are a professional writer or proofreader. Language is also a tool, not a force of nature, and it should change as people need it to.

I am absolutely not trying to be smug when I tell you that you're probably using the word "less" when you should be using "fewer". I didn't know this until I did my French A Level, so I'm not looking down on you for not knowing it either. It's a weird rule. In simple terms, this is how it works:

Less means "a smaller amount of" or "not as much". It refers to a smaller amount of something that can’t be counted or that doesn’t normally have a plural, such as money, time or music. 

Fewer is the comparative form of few, so it refers to a smaller number of people or things, such as houses, dogs, or clothes. 

So, in simple terms, you would have fewer bottles of milk, and less milk. 

You may be wondering why I'm taking the time to explain this to you if I'm not trying to assert some kind of weird linguistic dominance, or if I don't think that religious levels of correctness matter on a day-to-day basis. Because misery loves company, that's why. My life was a lot happier before I learnt this rule. Now, thanks to my A-Level French teacher and her insistence that I learn how to speak my own language correctly before taking on a second, I have to repress a mild psychotic episode every time someone asks me if I have "ten items or less". And now you will too.

Yours vindictively,

Rowena

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Dear 2006 Rowena,

That thing at the front of your hair that you think is a side-fringe? It's not a side fringe. It's curtains. You have curtains. For the love of God, just hurry up and get a full fringe cut in. It's cute, it suits you, and it's going to make your life easier when suddenly eyebrows become the biggest deal on the planet and you don't have to bother because yours are always hidden.

Yours long-sufferingly,

2016 Rowena