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Are you punishing yourself enough this January?

WE’RE halfway through a month of gruelling self-improvement, from temperance to exercise to chugging oat milk. But are you hurting yourself enough? 

Abstention

January is about tearing your body from the excesses of Christmas to full abstinence from all pleasure. Any consumption beyond the water and sawdust diet of Veganuary is forbidden. If you haven’t stopped smoking, because you didn’t smoke originally, start then stop. Same for hard drugs.

Exercise

The self-evident logic of ‘no pain no gain’ means that if you’re not in pain you’re loafing. Get a treadmill fitted in the shower and oars in the loo. Buy a second heath tracking watch, to monitor the health of the first watch just in case it can’t keep up with you and quits. Be in agony.

Be full of mind

A healthy body deserves a healthy mind. To get there, sanctimoniously zen power-meditate every questionable element of your personality away to the point of not having anything left. Stare in the mirror and see a perfect blank without wants or desires, as January deserves.

Obsessively declutter

A clutter-free life opens more space within your clutter-free mind, so Marie Kondo the shit out of every item you’ve ever owned. Label, categorise, and catalogue everything. Dispose of all those useless fripperies, keepsakes, friends, pets, partners and furniture. You don’t need anything to be who you really are.

Document your journey

Vlog every miserable microsecond of your self-improvement crusade. At some point Channel 5 will be doing documentaries on freaks like you and you can cash in. What viewing it’ll make on a cold February night when you’ve dropped all this self-improvement bollocks: you, a litre of gin, a bucket of chicken and a bowl of cake batter.

Nine reasons why your vote for Boris Johnson doesn't make you a prize dick

DID you vote for Boris Johnson in 2019? Feeling quite the rosette-wearing cock? Former Boris fan Norman Steele has nine pathetic ways to justify it:

He’d be a laugh down the pub

Boris is a great laugh with his Latin quips and tousled hair. Apart from he’s notoriously tight, swills chianti and nicks half your f**king crisps because he ‘thought they were for the table’.

He’s very intelligent

He went to Oxford and was a successful journalist, except his journalism was made-up shit and his books are rubbish. But you’d only know that if you read any of it, and why would you?

Who hasn’t tried to get their leg over?

All men try to get laid. Boris is a serial adulterer with illegitimate children who treats women like dirt with his selfish, pathological skirt-chasing, but so could I be if I’d not married young.

Boris is a patriot

He takes the piss out of foreigners and mentions the war. The mark of a man who’d have eight George Crosses up during the World Cup, not just one. And he apologised to the Queen like a true gent.

We were misled

If only someone – a journalist, or former boss, or close associate – had warned that Johnson was a sociopathic liar. But no one did. Proving this is a Remainer plot.

I thought he’d rise to it

Boris was a clown who faced with a serious challenge would come good. Okay, he didn’t, but it happens in films all the time like Independence Day, where the alcoholic pilot pulls himself together and blows up the mothership. So it was natural to think it.

You can’t blame the left-behind

Rundown high streets and rubbish jobs? It’s logical to vote for racists and Old Etonians in those circumstances.

He got Brexit done

Boris delivered Brexit despite all the warnings it would be a disaster, and it has been. You could argue that’s just doubly stupid. I say ‘Yes, but we told the frogs and krauts to piss off.’ It’s a matter of priorities.

He’s not your typical Tory politician

Apart from being rich, in favour of every right-wing Tory policy and a bit bigoted. But what’s that compared to hilarious haystack hair?

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