Prosecco and other fun drinks that become bleak as f**k when drunk alone

SOME drinks take parties to a new level but are tragic when knocked back alone. Avoid quaffing these during solo sessions.

Tequila shots

Tequila is one of the few alcoholic beverages that can heighten your mood and alertness. This doesn’t make it any less depressing when you single-handedly down half a bottle of the stuff on a Sunday morning though. Nothing screams ‘My life has gone irreversibly wrong’ like licking salt off your own hand in silence.

Prosecco

It’s acceptable to drink Prosecco during wedding receptions. How else are you supposed to get through them? If you don’t have company though, the bottle’s better off left in the fridge. Don’t let your shitty decorations which exclaim ‘It’s Prosecco o’clock’ convince you otherwise. They’re wrong. It’s not and it never is. That’s not how time works.

Punch

The quintessential party drink. As such, it’s borderline psychopathic to brew up a massive salad bowl full of vodka and store-brand fruit juice at home. You’re only spending the evening slumped on the sofa watching The Chase for f**k’s sake. Spike it with a sedative and knock yourself out to minimise the indignity.

Jelly shots

Far too much hassle for a solo drink. You’ve got to pour the jelly powder, mix it with cheap vodka, then portion it out and freeze 24 individual shots. F**k that. You’ll only down half a dozen of them before throwing up or passing out anyway. Crack open a can of Tennents Super, which is totally fine to drink alone.

Sangria

If an alcoholic drink can be served with a little umbrella in it then you should be surrounded by at least four friends. That’s not a law but it should be. Not because it’s a choking hazard, but because nobody deserves to look that pathetic. At least the tiny brolly would stop your tears falling into the glass though.

The seven stages of grief for a bloody hamster, by a dad

THE death of a family hamster is tragic for kids but boring for everyone else. Dad Roy Hobbs explains the seven tedious stages of their grief.

The discovery

By me, of course. Our daughter swore she’d look after the hamster devotedly but has ignored it ever since. When it was time to do my weekly chore of sweeping the shit pellets and piss-soaked sawdust out of its cage, there it was, kaput. If I hadn’t mentioned it was dead nobody would even have noticed.

Denial

It’s stiff as a board and doesn’t want to use its little wheel anymore, so the evidence is pretty conclusive. That won’t stop my daughter from insisting that it’s just sleeping though. If it is then it’s a bloody deep sleep, because knocking its rigid body against the table doesn’t seem to wake it up.

The tears

F**k me, my daughter barely paid the hamster any attention while it was alive, but now it’s died she’s acting like it was her best friend. If she’s treated her human pals with the same nonchalant disregard then I don’t think anyone will be turning up to her birthday party next week. God how I wish that were the case.

The burial

I should have covertly dumped it in the pedal bin while I had the chance. Now I’ve got to bury it in the garden which was apparently its favourite place, even though it never ventured beyond its cage. It’s a lot of wasted effort seeing as my daughter will forget about its very existence in a week’s time. She’d better not make me wear black.

Binning all the paraphernalia

That furry dickhead sure had a lot of stuff for something so small. The cage, ball and sawdust won’t fit in the bin, and there’s no way I’m booking a slot at the tip just to get rid of this shit. I’ll wait until the washing machine needs to go. In the meantime I’ll stick it in the shed with all the other crap my daughter begged for and used precisely once.

‘Daddy, I want another one’

Oh for f**k sake, really? No way. I made the mistake of buying a hamster once and I’ve regretted it every second since. They can’t do tricks, they bite your fingers, and they’re always noisily gnawing away at the bars on their cage. A pet rock would be more desirable, so turn off the waterworks, sweetheart.

The trip to the f**king pet shop

Christ, here we go again. Why do I keep letting this happen? She’s made a barrage of empty promises about how she’ll look after this one, which admittedly worked last time so you can’t exactly blame her. I can’t even use the last hamster’s cage because that would be wrong for some reason, so there goes another 30 quid. Only two years to go until I have to repeat all these steps.