Have a Shitty Weekend!

Photo by Jake Lewis

Ooh, I bet you have something really cool planned for this weekend, don’t you? Sure, last weekend was a write off, didn’t go to plan, no one turned up, you gave in after the early Saturday kick-off and went home to spend the next 36 hours in bed. But this weekend will be different. Everything is sorted, all your friends are free and pumped and now nothing can go wrong. Set banter-phasers to overdrive and let’s get on it – whey!

Nah mate, your friends don’t like you. Why do you think they never turn up to anything you organise? Picture your death bed. Tubed and wired up to your arsehole, breathing through a machine, barely able to muster the energy to keep your crusty, yellowing eyelids fluttering. You look around, and there’s people there. They’ve come to ease you into the next stage of existence, you think. To help you across. No. They’re here to watch you slip off, so they can confirm that they will no longer have to endure your company. They have champagne cocked not to celebrate your life, but to revel in your death.

No one wants you, no one ever did, so get on with your crap weekend, you awful, awful tosspot.

CROQUET EAST
Victoria Park, East London, Sat 12 April

Croquet East is a monthly event in which a gaggle of cum jars congregate in Victoria Park to act like extras in an Oscar Wilde play. They "cross mallets and bash balls while sipping Pimm's" and may as well be wearing bibs that say, "We’re cunts, why not come and punch us to death immediately?" Don’t be so hasty though, readers, because if you do that, you won’t be able to hear them "discussing the relative merits of Sartre and Descartes". And the gallery section of the event's website is even more depressing than that.

You know what? Have your Blitz night, your celebration of an imagined era, a playgroup booze-up making light of a prolonged and horribly attritional terrorist attack that killed 40,000-plus men, women and children, but I’ll be damned if this post-colonial wish-we-still-owned-slaves-for-the-banter toff-off festival of pricks is allowed to stand in my city. Enough of this ridiculous twee bullshit, it’s absolutely untenable. Take your mallets and balls and "cheeky references" to French philosophers and throw yourself into the fucking sea, you cunts.

THE LONDON MARATHON

Drag your flabby, chafing thighs up to Greenwich Park and watch a whole stadium's worth of self-serving, wacky jobsworths give themselves arthritis for about three hours. Stand in awe as thousands of people do something that literally every human being can do, but for a lot longer and slightly faster. It’s like watching Formula One except they only go round once and there's 35,000 of them and it’s way more boring. Yes, somehow there is something more boring than Formula 1. I suppose the organisers deserve some credit for that.

What are all these people running away from? They must’ve fucked up somewhere along the line. So, when you’re there, propped against the steel barrier, look into their eyes, the windows of their souls, and scrutinise them for agony. They are but numbers in onesies, panting pantomime acts scurrying their way to a rare afternoon off from their own guilt, and they have earned your scorn. Who knows, you might strike gold and have Paula Radcliffe empty her bladder onto your Croc while you bite into a cronut and wave a plastic Union Jack around.

CBEEBIES LIVE! THE BIG BAND
Phones 4u Arena, Manchester, Sun 13 April

Picture it: Your life is over. You went to the doctor's and found out there's a baby on the way and now you’re nothing. From here on in, you’re an education vessel, a shit cleaner, a spew wiper, a calm-downer. You don’t sleep. Your relationship with your partner is now frayed almost beyond repair. The restless nights are as long as they are silent and joyless, filled with anxiety, not just for the wellbeing of your brood, but over how you’re going to pay for it. Things are so expensive now, you weren’t prepared for this. You look down at your child and it smiles, and you smile back, but something’s missing. You can't help but reflect on the freedom that once was, wondering if the love you feel is just a chemical reaction to stop you from ending your life, so irreversible is your ruin. All these thoughts buzz through your head like wasps, jabbing their stinging arses into your limp and tired grey matter.

Suddenly, Mr Tumble appears out of nowhere, and he’s screaming in your face. "Who do we have here, then! Do you want to help me with a magic trick?" he yells at you. Your face fills with blood, pins and needles cover your dermis and before you know it the screams of a thousand children are reverberating around your skull. You catch yourself choking Mr Tumble and you try to pull away but with a gut-churning snap his windpipe gives way beneath your flushed hands. Don’t risk it mate, you’re a liability. Stay in, watch Peppa Pig and let the sadness wash over you.

Have a shitty weekend, Mum and Dad.

@joe_bish