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Are you hard enough to listen to a whole Adele album?

UNSURE if Adele’s new album 30 is for you? See if you’ve got the personal mettle to listen to all of these tracks without breaking down.

I’m Getting Divorced

Adele bravely confronts her favourite and most lucrative topic again. Contains the lyric ‘The dead flowers of hopeless love/Are buried in a barren cemetery of despair’. One song in and you are already pretty depressed.

Did I Mention I Got Divorced?

Ms Adkins reminds fans of her divorce, in case they’d forgotten about it in the five seconds between tracks. Emotional honesty is the order of the day. ‘Divorce really sucks,’ she sings.‘I cried on the bus the other day which was a bit of an embarrassment for everyone.’

The Bastard’s Taken the Good Casserole Dish 

The wildly successful songwriter gets down to the nitty gritty of breaking up, specifically the loss of a treasured casserole dish. It was the same quality as a Le Creuset, but a more reasonable price, and you could even do a whole roast chicken – just add some onion, carrots and potato you were good to go. Fans of easy one-pot meals will find it impossible not to shed a tear.

I’m Flying like a Bird Now (Without That Shit Bringing Me Down)

The singer switches to a more feisty, combative mode. ‘Don’t even think about the using the f**king joint account,’ she warns. ‘I know who all the DVDs belong to.’ By now listeners will really feel they need a break from the monomaniacal obsession with doomed marriage, although if you’re prepared to pay 400 quid for an Adele ticket, misery is clearly your thing.

An Upsetting Conversation with My Son 

Ms Adkins takes the brave, brutally honest step of including audio verite recordings of conversations with her nine-year-old son, who senses the complexity of adult relationships and suggests a game of ‘smash the robot’ while making ‘pee-ow pee-ow’ sounds representing laser blasts. Raw, stark and best ‘enjoyed’ with a cocktail of antidepressants.

It’s Comfy Here on the Floor With Some Wine

Adele’s trademark piano and lush orchestration bring out the quiet yet powerful dignity of a woman on her third bottle of shiraz who can’t see the point of getting up off the lounge floor as she’s actually quite comfortable lying here.

Moving On Backwards

A forensic recap of everything that went wrong in Adele’s marriage, right down to a boring trip to York Minster in 2018. Even her most devoted fans are now close to catatonic depression, which is just how they like it.

Five innocent texts that sound aggro as f**k to the recipient

NEED to relay basic information without sounding bitchy? Good luck – even these innocent texts sound passive aggressive.

‘k.’

Superficially this is a perfectly normal example of textspeak. You’ve shortened ‘okay’ to the more chummy ‘k’ so there shouldn’t be an issue. However your phone chucked in a full stop via autocorrect, giving your friendly approval the stern subtext of a pissed-off boss. The recipient has already started a group chat about how snotty you are.

‘Where r u’

A powder keg of miscommunication that’s going to blow up in your face. This terse question comes across as more threatening than Liam Neeson’s phone speech in Taken, and you may as well have typed: ‘ARE WE MEETING UP OR WHAT YOU USELESS LATE BASTARD???’

‘?’

People are too lazy to type ‘eh?’ or ‘what?’ when expressing their confusion, so using your fat thumbs to jab the question mark button then hit send is totally okay. Or so you think. Word has now spread that you’re a curt dickhead who thinks they’re too good to use letters anymore. Expect to be phased out of your friendship group with immediate effect.

‘Sure’

This breezy message of agreement is crackling with passive aggressive hostility. It doesn’t contain the faintest trace of excitement, and that capital ‘s’ is positively sneering with contempt. At least you didn’t send ‘fine’, which everyone knows is the text message equivalent of saying ‘f**k you’.

‘Great to see you xx’

The classic pincer move of bitchy aggro. ‘Great’ is the limpest word of praise in the English language, so what you’re really saying is that running into the recipient was as welcome as a migraine. Adding ‘xx’ is a masterstroke of linguistic violence because nothing comes across as more contemptuous than two measly, loveless kisses.

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