subscribe
/ Sign Out

Harry Potter, Russell Brand and other stuff you really dodged a bullet by not getting into

MISSED out on pop culture landmarks back in the day? Don’t worry. If these things passed you by, you won in the long run.

Harry Potter

Not reading the Harry Potter books when they came out made you a pariah in the playground. But at least your cherished memories of the wizarding world haven’t been ruined because they were written by someone who has since lost your respect by devoting themselves to the Twitter hellscape. You didn’t get tricked into pissing away two hours of your life watching The Crimes of Grindelwald, either. Lucky bastard.

Russell Brand

Everyone thought you were a bit uptight when you didn’t laugh at the ribald ramblings of a man with ridiculously coiffed hair who pranced around the stage in skinny jeans. It’s almost as if you could see the twat behind his comedy persona. You felt vindicated when the whole Andrew Sachs thing blew up, and his subsequent spiritual awakening has only proved your hatred right in new and surprising ways.

Little Britain

The early Noughties were a different time. Back then everyone laughed at chavs, moronic catchphrases and transphobic fat-shaming blackface on prime time BBC One. Everyone that is except you, who saw the problematic sketches for what they were. You do still enjoy watching Louis CK clips on YouTube though, so don’t feel too smug about yourself.

Kanye West

Yes, you admit he wrote some catchy tunes back in the day. But you never understood why Kanye/Ye/Saint Pablo’s fans fawned over him and forked out hundreds of dollars for his shit shoes. Couldn’t they see he was an arrogant prick who peaked artistically in 2007? Well, after his antisemitic comments and white supremacist fashion choices, they’re starting to get it.

Game of Thrones

So you were out of the loop of office chat for a few years. Big deal. At least you didn’t sink your time and attention into a TV show that ended disastrously or a series of books that the author can’t be f**ked to write anymore. The only people with worse luck are fans of The Wheel of Time.

Twitter

Imagine you’d set up an account, pinned your self-worth on regularly coming up with viral tweets, then some billionaire dickhead comes along, drives people off the site and undoes all your hard work overnight. That would suck. Oh, you did do that? Unlucky. At least it only cost you your mental health.

'We’ll go to that place you like after': How your partner tricks you into awful events

RELATIONSHIPS are all about compromise, which means you have to go to events you’ll hate. Here’s how your scheming partner will make you think it’ll be okay.

‘We’ll go to that place you like after’

If you agree to attend your partner’s two-year-old nephew’s party at a heaving, screech-filled soft play venue, they agree you can stop somewhere on the way home that you enjoy, like the KFC drive-thru or the pub to catch the second half of Arsenal vs Chelsea. Unfortunately, the end will never justify the means and you’re being taken for an idiot.

‘Such-and-such a person is going’

To tempt you into attending, your partner dangles the one person from their work/family/friendship group that they know you don’t actively hate. After grudgingly making small talk for a while, it gradually dawns on you that Fun Uncle Alan isn’t going to turn up, you’ve been dragged into it under false pretences, and now you’re stuck for the next five hours.

‘I think there’s a free bar’

A classic ploy when your partner has been invited to the evening do of a wedding and you have to be their plus one. The promise of free alcohol acts like a siren call and you agree, but on arrival it quickly becomes clear that the cash behind the bar has long been spent. You whine like a baby and your partner reminds you they only said they ‘thought’ there was a free bar, the tricksy bastard.

‘We’ll only go for an hour’

Let’s be clear: you won’t. Your partner genuinely believes this when they say it, and you are forever hopeful, but once you walk into that room, it’s game over. You’ll be at your partner’s great uncle’s wake until 11pm, listening to mind-numbingly boring stories about someone you’ve never met, and starting to wish that you were the one who was dead.

‘We can have sex later’

The promise of a shag works like magic so you agree to go for a long Sunday lunch with your partner’s insufferable uni mates. However, when you finally get home again, you’re so annoyed by the fact that they’re all much more successful than you, and clearly think you’re not good enough to be their friend, that you throw a strop and go and sleep in the spare room.

Next story ›