Have a Shitty Weekend!

(Photo by Jake Lewis)

Teaching you how to avoid having a bad weekend in the most persuasive way possible.

Opinions are like shitty weekends: everybody has them all the time. In fact, opinions dictate a large part of how shitty your shitty weekend turns out to be, as you’ll almost certainly be roped into some conversation with a stranger, or a friend, who's decided they must subject you to their opinion on the election, or the football, or the gender-diversity issues surrounding Bear Grylls' The Island.

Here’s a tip for those situations: just walk off. If you feel the conversation taking a direction that doesn't interest you – anything about street art, for example, or dreams – let your eyes glaze over, think of something else to do and just walk away. It's incredible – I did it last night and avoided being annoyed for at least four minutes.

Here's another piece of advice to avoid having a shitty weekend: don't go to any of these events.

SOHO FLEA MARKET 2014
Dean Street, Soho, Sun 25 May

Ever heard the term "amateur hour"? It’s believed to originate from an American radio series of the same name, in which amateur entertainers demonstrated their skills for the duration of the hour-long programme. It has since become a pejorative for the unskilled and is used to denounce people and events as being lazy, unorganised and generally pointless. I’m saying all this because the Soho Flea Market is back in town and promises to be the most amateur hour of the year to date.

Soho’s Dean Street will be full with "artisan and designer crafters", including "jewellery designers, furniture makers, ceramicists and artisans" (again). The good news is that it's not just sustainable camping equipment and necklaces made out of rubbish on sale, but a whole bunch of "new musicians and comedy talent" to remind you why you never watch bands or go to comedy clubs any more.

Last year they apparently welcomed 18,000 people, and numbers are expected to equal that this year. So if you want to spend your Sunday with a lower-league ground's worth of gullible wankers, be my guest, but I will not be having any part in it.

Paul Hollywood (Photo via)

PAUL HOLLYWOOD: GET YOUR BAKE ON
Watford Colosseum, Watford, Fri 23 May - Mon 26 May

As if watching Great British Bake Off on TV wasn’t already the worst way to ruin your evening, you now have the opportunity to pay for the pleasure. Watch in amazement as Paul Hollywood – a cross between an industrialist billionaire and a fictional serial killer – kneads dough and makes things rise, or whatever.

Better yet, he'll be "peppering the show with much kneaded [LOL!] anecdotes about the filming of the hit BBC2 carb competition". Those will be some doosies, eh? One of the contestants got butter on their nose! Mary Berry’s keks fell down and got covered in Victoria Sponge! Sue Perkins and Mel Giedroyc had a fist fight and garroted each other with Union Jack bunting!

Bear in mind that audience members will be picked at random to participate in "a baking challenge live on stage", so if you’re just a useless prick who happens to like baking, then get ready for the embarrassment of a lifetime as Paul Hollywood berates you for being shit at your hobby.

LONGITUDE PUNK’D
Royal Observatory, Greenwich, until 4 Jan, 2015

Somehow this towering pile of colostomy waste has managed to pass me by until today. Reading the listing for this exhibition made my heart race. It is so intrinsically crap that the mind struggles to believe it is even real. Longitude Punk’d is inspired by "the technical inventions that were presented to the Board of Longitude between 1714 and 1828". But what exactly does it inspire, I hear you whisper.

Steampunk art.

Eight "British Steampunk artists" have put their cogs together and "created a mix of historically inspired and wackily imaginative new works". It’s unbelievable that there is even one "British steampunk artist", let alone eight of the fuckers. The artwork all appears to be drawings of period dresses in the shape of an orrery, but I’d imagine there’s also probably a MacBook Pro made of brass telescopes – or an equinoctial dial with flying goggles and a top hat – hiding away in there somewhere.

If all this wasn’t bad enough, some of the artists have "whimsical monikers" like "Herr Döktor" and "Major Thaddeus Tinker". Didn’t these people get enough of a beating at school? Are they trying to entice me into a bit of adult bullying? At least it's inspiring; I now feel like it would be worth putting myself through a regime of agonising weight training, just so I can pack a hard enough punch to send these cunts back to the steam age.

@joe_bish