Have a Shitty Weekend!

Photo by Chris Bethell

For about a week now I have gone into my bank account, looked at my balance, and seen the empty swimming pool of "NIL" shooting daggers right back at me. I know what you’re thinking: ‘Joe, what about all the hundreds – nay – thousands of pounds you’re getting from these life-affirming and, frankly, exceptional articles warning us how we can avoid having the gashest weekend possible?’

Well, the thing about me is that I spunk it all away as soon as I get it. I spunk it on booze and Uber taxis. I spunk it on food I can’t afford. I spunk it and spunk it until every ATM, every till, every silver bill tray in town is covered in my steamy, white money. Because I know what a shitty weekend looks like, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to have to endure one. I have to fill myself with luxuriant foodstuffs and alcohol so that, even if something shit does happen, I won’t even know about it, so bloated with hedonism will I be.

Here are three things to avoid if you don't want to spend this weekend having a terrible time with idiots.

LONDON IN SLOW MOTION
Victoria Embankment, London, Sat 10 May

Tell you what this city needs, this bustling hotbed of commerce and activity, and that’s a load of slow-walking cunts jamming up the pavements on a slow-motion walking tour. You can already tell what the attendees will look like; the men will be walking with their hands behind their backs like scholarly Imams, the women, arms folded, gazing up at whatever landmark their tortoise-paced tour has brought them to. Children… Well, technically children aren’t allowed as it’s 14 or over.

Kids under 14 must be fucking screwing. It’s like when you can’t buy an 18-rated VHS, or go to the bar unaccompanied, even though all you want is a lemonade. Grown-ups are always trying to ruin your fun, and now they take away the slow-motion walking tours of London? Fuck that. I say all the under-14s need to unite under one banner, and show that yes: they CAN walk slowly, they CAN handle a shandy down the Crown & Anchor, they CAN deal with all the cum jokes in Scary Movie, mostly because they don't understand them yet.

It will no doubt end up in a load of Year-7s being kettled at Nelson’s Column, hurling empty Panda Pop bottles at riot police and getting their supple, soft heads caved in with nightsticks, but it will be for a noble cause, and under-14s of the future will no longer have to suffer the tyranny of exclusion from slow-motion walking tours. Godspeed, my snotty oiks.

Skip to 5:15 for the next bit of text to make sense

TABLE TOP SALE
St Column Minor Memorial Hall, Newquay, Sun 11 May

A little while ago, I began re-watching episodes of seminal alcohol madness documentary series, Booze Britain. In these artfully shot pieces, camera crews follows groups of men or women or both around their respective towns. It’s usually a town they’re going to university in or a town they will never leave. There were episodes in Stirling, Newcastle, Liverpool, Portsmouth, Weston-Super-Mare, and they all plumbed certain depths of debauchery, but nothing compared to the sheer madness of the Newquay episode. A group of about five or six men, who dubbed themselves "The Tanks", drank mineswept pints with fag ends in, shots of sambuca they’d gobbed in, snorted condiments, the lot. The grande finale came when one of them stripped naked in what looked like a takeaway shop, pissed in a pint glass and gave it to his mate, who then downed the whole thing, threw it up into a bucket and the naked man drank his own regurgitated piss and then threw it back up all over his mate again.

I can only imagine similar scenes will be witnessed at this weekend's Table Top Sale at St Columb Minor Memorial Hall.

THE SWORDS OF MIDDLE EARTH
Royal Armouries Museum, Leeds

The Leeds Royal Armouries Museum is getting an awful lot of mileage out of the word "swords" and "Middle Earth" here. They have a total of four, count them, four – 4 – swords in this non-exhibition, and they’re not even the fucking swords from the film. In fact, they’re not even the original replicas of the swords from the film, as apparently they’d "sold out" and were "limited to 10-20".

What? You couldn’t even get the fucking actual replicas that some nerd bag with too much money has on the wall in his room? Just say they’re the real ones from the movie, who the fuck is going to know the difference? It’s a sword, not the Adoration of the Magi, for fuck's sake. At least they were made by the same guy who did the originals, but it’s not the same, is it? If I was going to see Swords Of Middle Earth (I wouldn't) I want to see the swords that beheaded orcs and aided Frodo on his journey to the chasm of Mount Doom.

Also, wasn’t JRR Tolkien just getting lazy when he invented "Mount Doom"? All these elaborate names for places and people, and he sets up the final scene in fucking "Mount Doom"? Guy’s a cunt, but he probably had better weekends than you shit-munching fart-breathers will over the next two and a half days.

Have a shit one, prickos.

@joe_bish