Holding a grudge for 15 years isn’t long enough! There’s power in being petty

A woman has admitted she spent 15 years getting revenge on a man who wronged her friend – including breaking off his engagement – and I couldn’t be more proud of her. There’s nothing (and I mean nothing) more powerful than being petty. Believe me.

Putting yourself out unnecessarily to score points against people who might not even know you’ve scored them is more than just simple revenge – it’s an art form. And us Brits are brilliant at it.

We have form on petty behaviour. We’re world class. We are the originators of baking birthday cakes – for potholes (no, really: residents of Connemara in Galway were so incensed by the fact a pothole hadn’t been fixed by the local council after two years, that they bought it a caterpillar cake to celebrate its birthday). But we’re not just petty in contemporary times – we have form historically, too.

As James Felton describes in his book, “52 times Britain was a B***end”, the British Empire spent 30 years building a massive hedge the length of India at great expense and manpower – 12,000 guards had to watch it grow – to stop smugglers dodging the salt tax when they arguably should have just made the tax a bit more reasonable. 

Felton also details how we went to war with the Ashanti nation over a gold stool. We didn’t like their ruler so we banished him and “confiscated” all his stuff, but they had managed to hide one thing from us: a sacred stool said to contain the spirits of all the tribes that have gone before and all the spirits left to come. So obviously, we let it go… no need to be greedy, we had all their other stuff… 

Except, nah. We wanted the stool. We wanted to sit on the stool so sacred it had its own throne to sit on... a stool so precious that the king sat beside it like an equal. 

Years later, Frederick Hodgson was still going to sleep raging, thinking about how his arse would feel on that stool – he even sent scouts to recce for it – but when they came back empty-handed, he wangled a dinner invite with some British military lads. They really rolled out the red carpet for us, taught all the local kids how to sing “God Save The Queen” and old Freddie had a massive paddy that he wasn’t offered the stool to sit on at dinner, which sparked a war that went on for six months, with casualties into the thousands. We never got that stool. 

Skipping forward a few centuries: the artist formerly known as Lord Buckethead, now releasing albums under Count Binface, pays the fees to run for election every time. He knows he can’t win – he absolutely shouldn’t win – but he still does it, every time. And (I confess): I nearly voted for him. 

Even sensible seats of science like Nasa aren’t immune to pettiness. Jupiter and its moons were named by the Romans after the god Jupiter, with all the moons orbiting named after his affairs and lovers. When Nasa sent a scout up to check in on Jupiter and his moons, they named it Juno: Jupiter’s wife. Meaning... they sent Jupiter’s wife to check up on his affairs. Petty, Nasa. Petty. I love it.

And it’s not only the British: after a long-running feud, 50 Cent allegedly once spent $3000 buying 200 seats at the front of Ja Rule’s concert, just to make sure they were all empty.

This ingeniously petty idea also occurred to TikTok teens and J Pop fans, who clubbed together a few years ago to book up all the tickets for a Trump rally, so he was left rattling around in Tulsa all alone. 

In Canada, group of teenage boys got together and wore skirts to school to protest against what they deemed homophobic, restrictive uniform rules that prohibited queer students from wearing what they wanted to. 

Petty but… powerful. See? It works – because pettiness is ultimately about acts of rebellion. And it can work. Being petty can actively make change happen.

TikTok pettiness sank a Trump rally. Boys in skirts changed the uniform policy. We may laugh at the people buying their pothole a Colin the caterpillar cake and blowing up balloons, but I bet the local council thought pretty quickly, given the resulting publicity, about fixing the road.

Buckethead/Binface got people who weren’t at all engaged in politics reading his manifesto, and maybe – just maybe – reading someone else’s, too. He brings politicians who often feel completely untouchable down to a humble level – you can be the prime minister, run the whole country and still have to stand, cringing in a community centre, being photographed by the world’s press, next to a man dressed as a bin. 

And they don’t have to be national acts to be useful. Personally, I like to shame people who chivvy me about having children by being petty and implying that I can’t, which might actually stop them asking the question to another woman – a woman who has just had a miscarriage, say; or has found out she can’t have children, or who is trying and can’t get there. If my petty behaviour stops just one person hurting someone’s feelings, or makes them think twice about behaving like an idiot in future, then it’s a win.

Pettiness, applied well, is a superpower.

Vix Leyton is a Welsh stand-up comic