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How to fall out with your best friends forever by going on holiday with them

THINK going on holiday with your mates will be fun and relaxing? You’re wrong. Here’s why you’ll fall out after two days.

Assigning bedrooms

The moment you arrive at the Airbnb, there’s a tense stand-off about who gets which room. Tom and Emma insist on having the double with en suite because they’re a new couple, while Stephen and Paul get the bunk beds because they’ve been together for four years. Joanna is single so gets plonked on the sofa, despite paying the same amount as everyone else. Already a hierarchy has formed, and you only put up with your uncomfy single bed because you’re ‘better’ than Joanna.

Try to do everything together

You came as a group so you’re going to do everything together as a group, even though Sophie is already in a huge mood by 8am because she knows Nikki and Martin won’t get up until 10 at least. After Lucy takes 40 minutes to get dressed, the lunch reservation is missed and everyone bitches for ages about whose fault it is. At least everyone stops taking selfies for a bit. 

Go on a country walk

Josh’s idea of a country walk is to put on head-to-toe waterproofs, get out the appropriate OS map and do a 20-mile circuit of the local hills. Whereas Ryan’s is to dawdle reluctantly on a short footpath to a pub and moan about getting his fresh new Nike Airs muddy. In the end, everyone bickers about what to do until it gets too dark and someone puts a shit film on. Hey, who doesn’t go on holiday to watch The Da Vinci Code?

Attempt to split every single bill

To keep it fair, every single amount of money spent is split precisely six ways, even if it was Oliver buying a bag of crisps and some Rolos as car snacks. However, this suddenly doesn’t apply when Eleanor only has a salad for dinner and no alcohol and refuses to pay as much as everyone else. The staff of every establishment look visibly suicidal every time Kelly gets her calculator out as the bill arrives.

Get pissed and dig up some long-simmering resentments

When you go to the pub with your mates, there’s an inevitable point where you stop drinking and go home. Not so when you’ve rented a holiday cottage in Wales. You’ve got all night to keep drinking, get on each other’s nerves, and get annoyed by disagreements magnified 10,000x by booze. The next day it’ll be hard to tell if you feel nauseous from that unwise bottle of rum or making Zara cry over a minor slight from 11 years ago.

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Establish your territory

Sit at the same seat, ideally at the bar, and order the same pint of best (lager is a woman’s drink) with monotonous regularity. Monotonous, that’s you, as people subjected to your views on ‘snowflakes’, ‘transgenders’ and ULEZ will soon discover to their cost.

Act like you know it all (because you do)

Don’t let being none too bright and having no greater life experience than anyone else stop you being an expert on everything. The true pub bore is supremely knowledgeable about topics ranging from Viet Cong tactics to looking after tropical fish. The fact that you are wrong, and you’d kill the fish by feeding them carrots, isn’t a problem because you’re too f**king thick to realise.

Sound like a National Front leaflet

‘If they don’t like barges then they can f**k off back to France’ is the level of debate I’d like to see in the House of Commons every day (we’re getting there). The trick is to stop just short of actual racism. This way you can troll liberals without getting barred, sacked or prosecuted. Outwardly you are just an attention-seeking gobshite, but underneath you have the guile of that most cunning of animals, the wasp. 

Learn how to snare your victims

I like to mutter ‘Evening’ to unsuspecting drinkers. Encouraged by this bait they’ll come out with some chit-chat like ‘So much for summer!’. You’ve now established a conversational bridgehead and you can start opining about Sharia law – or another of your six or so tedious obsessions – and watch them squirm as they try to escape before you get to the really offensive bit.

Keep it fresh

Despite what I just said, there’s more to life than immigrants. I like to spice up the conversation by throwing in a topic you’d never expect in a million years from someone like me, such as bringing back the death penalty. Or address a contemporary issue thrown up by our fast-changing modern world, eg. ‘Should women have jobs?’

Bring up your working-classness frequently

Everyone loves listening to someone with a chip on their shoulder. Drippy middle-class Guardian readers have to listen to your working-classness out of guilt, and other working-class people need reminding that their working-classness is less authentic than yours. It seems like only yesterday I were down t’pit, learning the meaning of hard graft and fighting off Balrogs with my good mate Gimli. Or did I imagine that? It’s hard to tell when your head’s full of shit.

Enjoy banter with the ladies

There’s nowt wrong with a bit of harmless flirtation now that women are allowed in pubs. I used to be quite the ladies’ man, so if a bit of skirt is waiting to be served I’ll say: ‘You remind me of my daughter. ‘Course, I wouldn’t let her go out dressed like that.’ It’s just a shame that standards have dropped these days and too many young women use bad language like ‘Are you that f**king twat Lee Anderton?’ and ‘Your TV show’s f**king shit, by the way’.

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