Have a Shitty Weekend!

Photo by Jamie Taete

You know what’s shit? Birthdays. It’s my birthday soon, and I have no doubt in my mind it’s going to be a total shower of wet garbage raining down all over my head. The worst part of birthdays is the bit where you force everyone to spend money on you and give you loads of attention. I guess, in the spirit of things, it’s like transforming yourself into a newborn baby. A day where you can get legless and slur and spew up while people give you kudos just for being alive. Or you can sit at home and weep when the clock strikes midnight, like I did when I was 16. The choice really is up to you. I couldn't give two shits about your life.

Anyway, fuck that noise. Have a shitty weekend.

FINA/NVC Diving World Series
London Aquatics Centre, London, Fri 25-Sun 27 Apr, £15-45

The FINA/NVC Diving World Series, or as I like to call it, the Broken Leg Simulator, gives you all the rush of being near a swimming pool, inhaling the chlorine and reminding you of childhood holidays, but without letting you anywhere near the water. In other words, it's a metaphor for getting older and being forced to witness the joy disappear from your life that you have to pay for and lasts all day.

Watch in amazement as people fling themselves off high platforms into a big box of liquid, maybe doing one or two spins in the air as they go. Exhilarating! It’ll be the first time since the end of the Olympics that the doors to the London Aquatics Centre have been opened, so I guess you’d better head down as it’s less accessible than the fucking Grand Lodge of the Freemasons.

I’d imagine this is the sort of thing you think will be a good idea in your head. 'The diving championships? Well alright, sounds like fun!’ Then you get there and it’s like God flicking people-shaped rocks into a big puddle over and over again and you become increasingly aware that all this time and that money will never be returned to you.

Reincarnation is a lie.

Fancy Meeting You Here
British Museum Fri 25 Apr and Tate Modern Sat 26 Apr

If this doesn’t inspire absolute and total dread inside your heart then, paradoxically, there's no hope for you at all. Fancy Meeting You Here is "part museum tour, part cultural endeavour, part stand-up show". That’s right, you can have a bunch of no-name stand-up comedians – the most popular of whom is Josie Long, for fuck's sake – guide you around the Tate Modern and the British Museum, cracking jokes about the engorged penises of fertility artefacts as you go.

Has the craft of stand-up comedy reached such a nadir that the only way they can get any attention off people is by following them around museums? Serious question. Another serious question: Have these people no shame? And what about you? Why do you indulge these adult-children? Stop living your life like everyone knows where the bodies are buried.

New Cross and Deptford Free Film Festival
Various abandoned places, South London, Fri 25 Apr - Sun 4 May

Before this week, I had never heard the phrase "open-air bike-powered movie screening" before in my life. Now, I look back on those days fondly, as a time of greater innocence, lost to me like tears in rain.

New Cross and Deptford Free Film Festival will be held in "housing co-ops, an old police station, a pool hall" and some other similarly decrepit, detritus-filled "spaces" that urb-ex guys wish they could get legally married in. The real piece de resistance, though, is the fascinating concept of one or more cunts physically powering a film screening with their smooth, muscly legs, no doubt encouraging cheering from the crowd when they start to get tired. Wouldn’t be able to hear the film though would you, mates? Pretty fucking pointless if you just end up focusing your attention on a prick on a static bike, isn’t it?

Who wants to watch films in the open air anyway? What is this, the fucking intro sequence to The Flintstones? Get a life.

@joe_bish