subscribe
/ Sign Out

Double your drinking and four other ways to make it feel like the weekend

ARE your weeks blurring into one long snack-laden, news-addled pyjama fest, broken only by a few half-arsed attempts at work? Here’s how to change that.

Double your drinking

If you want to feel anything like as hungover and plagued with regret as you used to at the weekend, up your alcohol intake. The only bar you can prop up these days is the metaphorical one you’re lowering for yourself each day, but don’t let that stop you drinking deep.

Halve your exercise

Remember when you used to get to the weekend exhausted, instead of feeling like a caged animal whose only real daily exertion is chewing? Challenge yourself to move even less than you do in the week. Piss on the sofa if you have to.

Regret all your virtual social plans

Weekends were once about arranging to see people and instantly regretting committing yourself to having to make any kind of effort. Thankfully you can still do this via an app, and be as morosely terrible company as you are in real life.

Achieve less than you wanted to

It’s not the weekend if you don’t feel like you should be doing more with this precious free time. Be sure to dream unrealistically big about what can be accomplished so that you feel the usual disappointment, for example buy an expensive set of weights that you only use as a door stop.

Get depressed on Sunday night

There’s nothing like the dread of a regular Sunday evening that says ‘it’s the end of the weekend’. As you don’t have to get up and go to work the next day, have a big news binge instead. That will make you feel as anxious and fearful as a Sunday night should.

The Wetherspoons regular's guide to daytime Zoom drinking

THE ‘Spoons is closed so there’s no longer anywhere to while away the day. Follow regular Norman Steele’s tips and turn your own home into a daytime chain pub. 

Never make eye contact

Set up your phone or laptop to one side of you, to capture your craggy boozer’s profile and your frequent long, despairing exhalations. Never look at it just as you’d never look at your fellow drinkers. It’s enough that you’re in the company of like-minded souls.

Never speak

Nobody needs to hear a load of prattle when they’re supping their pint of heavy. That’s for the evening crowd. Keep yourself to yourself, and make sure there’s no music in the background to disturb the grim atmosphere, just like the real Wetherspoons.

Give your pub a name

Look up a local luminary you can name your pub after. Perhaps a man who lived on your street invented the mop-and-bucket or composed a stirring martial march and deserves recognition. Or just name it after whichever previous resident gets most unpaid gas bills. Your regulars won’t f**king care.

Walk a very long way to the toilet

If Wetherspoons are known for anything, it’s walking across the pub, up the stairs, up the next stairs, and down a long landing to the toilet. Recreate that magic by doing nine laps round your bedsit before having a piss, leaving your pint alone on screen for others to salivate at.

Go home at 6pm

Your virtual Wetherspoons will soon be flooded by the young, the cheerful, those who still have hope. Leave them to it. Shut your Zoom session down at 6pm sharp. You’ll see all the same haggard faces at 9am tomorrow anyway.

Next story ›