It is the 14th century and the sun is setting beyond the trees. Leaves rustle, the sky glows pink. The wind bristles on bare arms. The air dips from warm to cool. Solstice days, those giddy nights in the midst of high summer, were grand occasions: a bonfire on a slope spits a wall of smoke out that curls slowly down towards the lake; a reverent flock lights candles and sings songs. Pigs turn slowly on their spits. Lush summer bounties – strawberries, raspberries, lamb, rabbit, peas and beans – are laid out on a long table, and the village collects around it, sharing wine and songs and mead. Praise be to the summer gods, they say, for all that they bring unto us. Lay the holy stones and pray upon them. Summer is here, amen amen amen.

Until your boy John Mirk of Lilleshall Abbey, Shropshire came along. For John Mirk did say this, of the 14th century midsummer rituals: "At first, men and women came to church with candles and other lights and prayed all night long." Those were the good times Then: "In the process of time, however, men left such devotion and used songs and dances and fell into lechery and gluttony, turning the good, holy devotion into sin."

See that? We ruined the holy summer by getting too into the sesh. This was 700 years ago. We ruined the holy summer by getting too drunk and pinching too many arses and eating too much food and shouting the lyrics to Wonderwall at kick-out time outside the pub. We did this 700 entire years before we actually did it: we trailblazed the Good Old Fashioned British Summer Holiday half a millennium before it actually became a thing. Ruining summer by getting fucked up on lager is hardwired into our blood, into our bones. It is our birthright and our destiny. And now it is July, and it is our time to fulfil that.

You are going on holiday this summer. You are going to make some bad decisions. A lot of these will be alcohol-related. Here's how to get through it and live:

It has to be said that the temporary tattoo is the mark of a coward anyway: either get a real tattoo or don't get any tattoo at all. Don't just put the tip in. But don't, in particular, get a henna tattoo in Zante, or anywhere like that. As a viral tweet aptly demonstrated last week, it's really easy to have an allergic reaction to black henna while on holiday and end up with a Mike Tyson tattoo-shaped scar for the next three to five.

Summer does not officially start until the first pale boy of the year sacrifices his forehead up to the sun gods, accidentally falling asleep after 1x park cider some time around the May Bank Holiday and waking up with a perfect pink-puce forehead like he head-butted a crate of tomatoes. "Wear sunscreen," we are warned, with photos of him looking severely sunstroked in the local paper, head lolling, eyes white-drunk to the ceiling, his mum perched on the end of a sofa looking sincere, holding a greasy tube of aloe gel. "You have to wear sunscreen or you will be burned." That is the gong. That is the start of summer.

I am convinced there is something in the British mentality that makes us all think we are somehow harder than the sun. All of us seem to think that, secretly, we and we alone have within us the strength to deflect the sun's rays, to endure its UV light, to absorb its heat and turn it into a slick tan and nothing more. And that's how we all end up swaying and loopy, vomiting in a public bin, perfectly red, because we think wearing a cap is "for dickheads".

What I am saying is: wear sunscreen. Not even just to avoid burning, although that's a decent pay off. Not even to ward off the ills of skin cancer, although that helps too. Do you know the single thing that ages people the most? Being burnt the fuck up by the sun. I am appealing to the vanity in you here: if you want to look halfway shaggable still in ten years, wear some sunscreen this summer.

A really good way to feel hungover basically the moment you start drinking is to drink in a pressure-controlled air-conditioned cabin where you are completely reliant on the routes and routines of three cabin crew members – who all hate you – to bring you your next vodka mini, so I personally advise against it. If you absolutely have to get on it, follow this rule of thumb:

ACCEPTABLE TIMES TO DRINK ON AN AEROPLANE: When you and a bunch of stag lads have absolutely taken over a 90-minute flight to a Spanish island resort and all chipped in £20 to get a round of six cans in, which you all pound while shouting "wahey";

UNACCEPTABLE TIMES TO DRINK ON AN AEROPLANE: Literally every other time; there is no point at all. No, I know the tiny whisky bottles are free. But you are going to start your holiday already feeling worse than when you got on the plane.

Pretty good way to lose £200 is to go "holiday clothes shopping", where you instantly get so carried away with the kimonos, maxi-dresses and stuff that you just keep buying and buying clothes you will literally wear once because they cannot possibly be worn when you bump back to real life in ten days (T-shirt that says "TROPICAL" on it, anyone? Aztec-print own-brand Toms? A cap?). Take this from me, the man who went holiday shopping last year and somehow bought four granddad collar shirts for a six-day trip, and then spent £18 on a neck pillow: you have enough T-shirts, shorts and flip-flops already. You maybe need a big hat and some slightly less fucked up sunglasses. Treat yourself to 1x new item of holiday clothing, to get you in the spirit.

A pretty good scam is you rent a jet ski (or similar high-powered engine-having device designed to kill as much as thrill) and you, the idiot, blithely hand your passport in as insurance, and then when you come back from the sea or wherever you are accused of dinging or in some way impairing the vehicle in question, and you – passport-less – are in a position of complete barrel-over bending, and so you pay €300 or whatever to get it back. Don't do this! Don't fall for this!

There is a certain facet of the horniness spectrum that only really kicks in about your body when you are on holiday, and normal ideas of modesty and prudishness go out the window, and you are like a dog with its tongue lapping out of the car window, only in this analogy the car is your own body, the dog is your own horny mind and the motorway the Volvo is driving down is "anyone in shorts on the strip in Majorca". Like, you are irresistibly horny, right now. A different, delicious flavour of horniness. You are so horny it is illegal.

This has consequences: the most British thing it is possible to do is be arrested on a beach for shagging, but you are going to want to go on a beach and shag on it, and you need to do so tactfully. There is a difference between a "nude bottoms on fine white sand" out in the open shag and an illicit fuck-to in a lifeguard's hut. These are what sand dunes are for, and beach umbrellas. This is what the soft quiet cover of darkness is about. If possible, shag near-motionlessly under a camouflage tarpaulin. But don't just drink two pitchers of Woo Woo, lose your knickers in a taxi and then beach shag directly under two lampposts. The police hate that.

We celebrate the sesh, we love the sesh, we revere the sesh. The sesh is everything to us. Every weekend, sesh sesh sesh. Weeknights, sometimes, sesh sesh sesh. We are the sesh gremlins, see us roar. When the world around us is dying, when our hopes are burned to flames in front of us, when we can barely rent a house let alone buy, when we can barely hold a job down let alone a good one, when all of the glory we were promised has turned to ash in our hands: the sesh is cheap, the sesh is fun, the sesh is our hope. But also fucking hell check between your gym card and that Costa's Reward Points thing in your wallet, because you left half a gram of ket there two months ago and if the lads at Stansted find it before you do then they are going up your arse about it, no question.

We are going to play a Choose Your Own Adventure based on an actual quandary faced by me, once. Going to sketch a situation out and we'll see what you do. Let's go:

YOU are queuing in an AIRPORT. YOU look at the COLUMN next to YOU. On it is a LAMINATED PLACARD. It is A4 SIZED. It reads, roughly. "Do Not Take Photos. Address The Customs Guard Directly. Do Not Say the Word 'Bomb' or 'Bombs', Even As A Joke Mate, Or You WILL Be Prosecuted"

DO YOU:

1: Say the word "bomb", as a joke. As a funny joke.

2: Sweat for a really long time, clench your temples at the force of it, really, really think about saying "bomb" or "boom" or "here come da boom", but ultimately choose against doing that.

If you chose #2: congratulations, you are alive and writing today. If you chose option #1: sorry, you died, in a mighty hail of bullets, and they didn't even bury your body; they just threw it in a big metal bin.

If you are a soft-around-the-edges big lad then you are going to want to cover up your little boy bosoms whenever you go to a swimming park or for a dip in the sea: this is a natural reaction and I fully understand it. Sadly, "T-shirt slicked in parts to a soft bulbous body" is possibly the worst look in all the human world – worse than that fringe you had when you were 15, worse that Limp Bizkit-era big jeans, worse than all of that – so you need to own it. Not more padding about in shorts and a soaking T-shirt. Take your top off, sweet boy. Own that husky pudding. Also, nobody cares. Just be a Big Narstie in a world of Jon Favreaus .

AirBnbs are a very good way to stay in someone's shitty flat that is far less in the city centre than advertised OR to hire a big villa for someone's birthday bash which seems fine at first until it turns out nobody in the place can find a single towel, not even one, but be wary: there is a big difference between "sleeps 8!" and "8 beds", which you will discover when half a dozen of you try to sleep top-to-tail on a fold-out sofa because someone didn't read the booking form closely enough and you didn't manage to all check-in until it was 11PM and far too late to sort it.

Mate, you don't need 3kg of miniature Toblerones and a whole litre of eau de parfum; you just think you do because you've been trapped in a series of queues for two hours and finally you've been set free into this wonderland where everything is larger than it needs to be and 20 percent off because of some mysterious dark force called "duty". First person to explain to me what duty even is gets to carry this clunky large bag of Kinder Chocobons on the plane with them so they go all warm and melty and reform in the wrong shape because you had to hold them for three hours clasped between your legs.

A lot of holiday advice also applies to day-to-day life, and I suppose no more than this one, but again just a reminder: try to not shit yourself, buddy. Because just so we all think we are inexplicably sun-proof, so we all also expect our stomachs to be somehow immune to contaminated water, and that we can drink and chew what we like without any sort of anal repercussions, and what I am saying is: most people in this country can't even drink out of a French tap without shitting, so don't take anything for granted out there.

You know how you come back off a week-long holiday trip where you constantly drank and ate chips and you feel sort of like a truck has hit you at a very high speed? And then when you go to the supermarket and see a pear you sort of – only for a second, only for a fraction of a second – forget what it is? Yeah. Buy a European banana and eat it one day on a hangover. Your body will thank you.

You've packed 12 T-shirts for one long weekend, chill the fuck out. You know where sells T-shirts, in case you run out of T-shirts? Every country in the fucking world.

Nobody has ever been impressed by a dive-bomb, and literally everyone alive hates being pushed in the pool. Just sit on the side with a book and behave yourself.

You know?

Listen, we're on thin enough ice as-is with Europe at the moment, so please, please – from me, from everyone – please, if you're going to go on a booze cruise, please, please just don't end up doing one of those "see how many tits you can fit in your mouth" or "can you shag someone over the side of a boat" or "40 blowjobs in one minute" sex games that always get us in trouble. Please, please don't do it, and if you absolutely have to – if you absolutely have to suck 40 dicks in one Spanish minute, so compelled by the holiday spirit are you – then at least make sure nobody is filming you do it, come on now, I am begging, please please please please please—

@joelgolby