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Five things that will shatter your hopes of a lie-in

EXHAUSTED and looking forward to an extra hour in bed? Here’s five reasons why it won’t happen this or any other weekend:

Call of nature

Once you’re over 40, that extra half a glass of beer before bed will return to haunt you at precisely 4.03am. The more you ignore it, the more pressing it gets, leading you to be up at half past five in the morning doomscrolling through the news whilst your annoying partner snores blissfully on.

House occupants

Whether it’s a member of your shared house who has enthusiastically discovered sex again after lockdown or your kids fighting over whether to watch Adventure Time or trash the kitchen making pancakes, having other people there ruins any possibility of sleeping in. Consider locking them out the night before.

Signing for a neighbour’s package

Deciding to have a package delivered before 8am on a Sunday is stupid, but not waking up to receive it, necessitating the delivery driver to bang your door down instead, is infuriating. Sign for the package, go out for the day and then pop round at 3am the next morning to helpfully deliver it. Or chuck it in a hedge.

Best friend

You love your best friend, but who comes round with a relationship crisis first thing in the morning? If they didn’t want to be told the reason they are perpetually single is because they are needy and inconsiderate, they should have come mid-afternoon when had time to drink a strong coffee and open a bottle of wine.

Power tool man

Every weekend morning, the man next door who has a worrying enthusiasm for power tools will find another part of his home to destroy and rebuild, dragging you from peaceful slumber into vivid imaginings of what you’ll do with his angle-grinder if he persists. Which he will, for the whole, miserable day.

'100 per cent' and other annoying ways to tell someone you agree with them

WHY agree by saying ‘yes’ when you could annoy the crap out of someone by saying ‘100 per cent’? Try these irritating affirmatives:

100 per cent

The word ‘yes’ is elegant, precise and performs its job perfectly. Why, then, do so many people feel the need to mumble out this five-syllabled monstrosity in its place? It is not more positively affirming than saying yes; it just makes you sound like a prick.

Okey dokey

‘Okey dokey’ is a phrase so twee that the only people who can get away with saying it are children’s TV presenters and characters in Wes Anderson films. If you get into the habit of using it regularly it’s important to be aware that your family, friends and lovers all want to punch you every single time.

Yasss queen

Sounds great coming out of the mouth of a drag queen at a New York ball in the 1980s. However, when your line manager shrieks it at you in an office in Nuneaton because you’ve managed to fix the jam in the photocopier, it’s nails down a blackboard.

Totes

Accompanied by the incitement-to-violence ‘amazeballs, this actually makes you even more of a twat if you say it ironically. It may save you the 0.07 seconds of your life it would have taken to say ‘totally’, but you can say ‘yes’ even quicker without shaming yourself, your family and your culture.

Fo’ shizzle

Are you Snoop Dogg rolling a blunt in the early aughts? Or is it a misguided attempt to steal his Just Eat cool? If it’s the latter, you must never, ever let this escape your lips again. Just nod from now on. Language is off-limits to you.

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