Getting married, and other things that are insane to do at Christmas

DECIDED to f**k up everyone else’s Christmas by having a wedding? You probably think these other things are a great idea too.

Getting married

Of all the monumentally selfish things you can do at Christmas, getting married is the worst. For you it might seem incredibly special and romantic, but for your friends and family who have to figure out the logistics of travelling hundreds of miles two days before Christmas, as well as buy a new outfit and shell out for a hotel, it’s just a monumental pain in the arse. They may be smiling in the photos, but it’s through painfully gritted teeth.

Going on holiday

Think getting on a plane to the Caribbean on Christmas Eve will result in a lovely, relaxing festive holiday? Think again. The roads will be gridlocked, the airport will be packed and time you could have spent swilling Baileys at home will instead be spent standing in a massive queue for security anxiously checking your watch. And that’s if your plane and therefore the whole trip isn’t cancelled at the last minute, forcing you to go to the petrol station on Christmas Day to purchase cheese strings and a Twix for dinner.

Travelling miles to visit people

If you’re visiting anyone more than a ten-minute walk away on Christmas Day, you have lost your mind. Even if you drive somewhere fairly local, someone will have to suffer through the whole event sober, and if you set off on a three-hour trip in order to get somewhere for dinner, you’re bound to break down, meaning you’ll be spending Jesus’ birthday in a lay-by on the M5 waiting for the AA and quietly weeping.

Going to the pub

The novelty of going down the pub on Christmas morning is fun, but also means you’ll get overexcited and neck four pints in 40 minutes and end up utterly shitfaced, then spend the rest of the day asleep in an armchair while your partner’s family mutter darkly about your ‘problem’. When you finally wake up at 10pm everyone else will be going to bed and all that will be left to eat is a dry bit of turkey and a bowl of warm, sloppy trifle.

Having Christmas dinner at a restaurant

Christmas lunch at a restaurant means nobody has to cook or wash up, and you can all just enjoy each other’s company. Seems like a lovely idea until you have the realisation that obsessively basting a turkey or methodically cleaning every fork and spoon in the house means you don’t have to talk to your family. And now you’re stuck listening to Uncle Brian’s opinions on small boats while waiting staff obviously pissed off to be working on Christmas Day sullenly slop gravy on your best trousers.

Going to a club on New Year’s Eve

The only thing more dickish than getting married at Christmas is forcing a friend to accompany you to a nightclub on New Year’s Eve. It is 100 per cent guaranteed to be shit and full of the most awful bellends in the local area, so all you can do is get hammered and then wake up to 2025 with a horrific hangover and someone you really don’t fancy in your bed. Start as you mean to go on.

Lovers' Guide, and other sexy things that look pathetically dated in hindsight

THE famous 1991 sex tips video Lovers’ Guide is in the news due to the sad death of one its stars. But like so many vaguely forbidden sex things, the reality didn’t match up…

Early internet porn

Boy, were you in for some hot wanking! Well, after having your ears tortured by a screeching dial-up modem and waiting ages for an image to download. Only then could you self-abuse while praying no one walked in on you and your large, slow, non-portable desktop PC and monitor. It was just so sexy.

Lovers’ Guide 

Watching this fabled video would lead to unimaginable sexual pleasures. Actually you could just buy it from WHSmith, but it was still regarded with the same awe as a sexy version of the Necronomicon. It’s basically just a real couple having real sex with a constant female voiceover that sounds as if she’s warning you about firework safety. Just because we have sexual fantasies, she says, ‘doesn’t mean we have to do it in real life’. Well that’s bloody fortunate when it comes to sex with Leia in the Ewok village.

Sitting on your hand prior to masturbation

The classic schoolyard ‘sex’ advice. The fatal drawback is that it’s impossible to avoid the fact that there’s no one else there, however numb your hand is. And if there had been a real woman present there’s zero chance it would have been Kim Wilde.

Tame erotic thrillers 

Various ‘erotic thrillers’ like 9½ Weeks got a reputation they didn’t deserve for being vaguely erotic rather than particularly explicit. Maybe it’s because everything on TV in the 1980s was relentlessly child-friendly to ensure massive audiences, such as The A-Team, Manimal, Knight Rider, Street Hawk and Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. Admittedly that featured a robot shaped like a glans, but no one wanted to have sex with him. Poor Twiki.   

Much-hyped porn films 

Caligula, Debbie Does Dallas, Emmanuelle, Deep Throat – people could not wait to get their hairy palms on a fuzzy VHS copy. They’re all bad in their own way – it’s frankly unnecessary to smoke a cigarette with your vagina as foreplay – and basically a pain to watch compared to short, sex-filled modern pornos. Imagine if every Pornhub video required you to watch an hour of the female star working in a shop. Quite.

Naked Yoga and similar on Channel 4

Early in its life, Channel 4 started putting on controversial sexy stuff, such as Naked Yoga, My Beautiful Launderette and the ‘Red Triangle’ films in case you wanted to see an obscure French art film about an incestuous urban caveman (Themroc if you’re curious). Very little of it was that shocking, but it hasn’t stopped C4 continuing to court controversy with juvenile drivel like Naked Attraction, hosted by Anna Richardson, who we refuse to believe is nearly as interested in sex as she makes out. 

Animal Farm

Ew. The pathetic aspect of this horrible, misogynistic bestiality flick for sickos is non-perverts like you wanting to see it out of morbid curiosity. Rest assured you will get your comeuppance by actually watching it. Definitely not one of George Orwell’s best.