Have a Shitty Weekend!

Photo by William Coutts

Welcome again, friends, to Have A Shitty Weekend. You might think that after a few incarnations of this series, I’d become a little easier on the hard-ons who put on these terrible events – but you’d be mistaken. If anything, my vitriol grows more potent with every passing week, my malice turning my blood hot crimson red and robbing me of all mercy.

Most Curious Wedding Fair
17 Amhurst Terrace, E8 2BT, London

So you’ve taken the plunge. You’ve met your better half, one of you has had the sheer gall to suggest you never leave each other's sides, and now bang: it’s time to prepare for your big day with all the vigour of a Japanese soldier flying a plane full of dynamite into a yankee harbour.

But you guys are different. You want to do things your own way. So you're spending the weekend at the Most Curious Wedding Fair, which is rolling into town at Hackney Downs Studios. For a meagre £5-6, you can look at vintage dresses, one-off gowns, tweed suits and "millenery", whatever the fuck that is, and spend the most important day of your life dressed like you have VIP wristbands at a Mr B the Gentleman Rhymer concert.

My parents went to a registry office and then got rat arsed in some shit hotel in Streatham, and they’ve been together for about 35 years. Think about it: Tweed suits and vintage dresses are a bad omen. Because why would someone give away their wedding dress? So they wouldn’t have to look at it and be reminded of colossal, life-rupturing heartbreak.

Net Ball Super League
Northumbria University

I get the feeling that netball shouldn’t really even qualify as a sport. It seems to be more like the sort of exercise you’d get someone to do if they'd had a terrible accident and were learning how to use their arms and legs again. Push the ball upward, stand still, take your time. The muscles have been dormant for so long they’ve forgotten what they’re here for. You’ve been in a coma for months, the doctors didn’t think you’d make it out, and if you did, you’d be brain dead, not worth the oxygen being fed into your lungs, or the mush being pumped into your guts. You wake up, but the seasons have changed. The spring of your life has turned to autumn, and you weren’t even there to watch it go by. Your stasis has lost you friends, relationships, time with people you love whose lives are, like all of ours, finite. You’ve lost so much.

But netball is here to regenerate you. The rectangular court seems intimidating now – the basket so high on that blue metal pole – but you’ll soon learn that it’s your best friend. You put your bib on and you struggle, but you’re determined to see this autumn through. To return to the spring of your lost mind. The crinkly, ochre leaves will be crushed beneath your step, and you will learn to live again.

But yeah, fuck going to see netball live.

London Coffee Festival
The Old Truman Brewery, E1 6QR, London

Not too long ago, I took umbrage with a craft beer festival that was going on in an old brewery in Brick Lane. I guess London Coffee Festival falls into the same bracket for me and that is: How in Christ’s name can you have such a bold interest in a drink, that you’d go to an event themed around it?

Coffee enthusiasts are kind of proto-real ale twats. They’re usually a lot younger as their hearts can take the onslaught of caffeine, whereas your garden variety ale prick is at the stage in life where he just wants to drown his boring bonce in brown dishwater. It depends which side of the "life beginning / life ending" fence you happen to fall on.

Your coffee upstarts went to nursery in Starbucks, got their GCSEs at Monmouth Coffee and have now fully graduated with a 2-1 from Self Righteous Auto-Barista Arsehole University. In relative terms, "Cravendale's MILK Battle" doesn’t sound too shite, neither does "The Science of Espresso, Deconstructed", even thought it says that the "team from La Cimbali [will be] getting geeky about grinding, temperature, pressure and milk", which makes me want to dip my dick in a venti soy with an extra shot [to the hippocampus (with a gun)].

But it’s shit like "speciality coffee roaster Julius Meinl encouraging visitors to share their favourite piece of poetry at the Poetry Cafe" that makes this whole affair such a bolus of wankers. The beat generation was like 100 years ago – we don’t need pricks in turtlenecks reading poetry and drinking coffee any more. That joke is so old I’m ashamed of even making it, but what choice am I left with? Coffee is only popular because cocaine is expensive and illegal.

Have a shitty weekend.

@joe_bish