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Cheese-rolling, and other quirky feel-good stories of 2024 with sinister subtexts

THE time of year when the media fills space with round-up of whimsical news stories of the year has come around. But are they actually deeply disturbing conspiracies? 

Cheese-rolling: rural people are violent lunatics

Chasing a wheel of cheese downhill is an excuse for muscular farm labourers to cripple rivals by elbowing them with enough force to blind them. Once the BBC leaves, the dominant male f**ks the cheese right there in the field.

Mum becomes TikTok sensation: she no longer is

A mum got millions of views for mildly amusing cake designs filmed by her teenage daughter. Interest faded to nothing within 48 hours. She feels nauseous with shame when friends bring up her grandiose plans to create a celebrity food empire.

Pub regulars perform imaginative charity stunt: they’re all bigots

Drinkers raise an impressive £15,000 towards an MRI scanner by sleeping in a bed up a tree, until local radio interviews broadcast banter which reveals they find racial slurs both hilarious and daring and believe white Britons are treated worse than Rosa Parks. Ah.

Child takes award-winning photo: this is their greatest and final success

A nine-year-old wins a competition with a funny pigeon photo. Will he become a successful photographer? No. All he did was flukily tap a button. After failing his GCSEs it’s minimum wage all the way to 66 and a state pension, if they still exist.

Star Wars marriage proposal: woman only accepted because she was filmed

A Star Wars fan proposes by turning up at his girlfriend’s workplace dressed as Obi-Wan Kenobi. She says ‘yes’ because it’s streamed live on Facebook. The event-starved local TV news gets hold of it and she’s forced to feign engagement to a twat with zero resemblance to Ewan McGregor.

Supermarket staff release rap track: someone should be honest with them

A group of supermarket workers record a novelty song at a local studio, which briefly goes viral because it’s shite. Wrongly, they come to believe they have a viable music career and nobody has the courage to burst their bubble, until a real record label tells them to f**k off.

Traditional pagan festival is great fun: locals practice human sacrifice

The village of Woldmarsh holds a festival to appease local pagan entity ‘Black Sam’, with painted faces, a parade and symbolic sacrifices. That’s all for the cameras. The real ceremony happens at midnight, deep in the woods. Black Sam demands blood.

Village makes life-size famous artworks: Why?

The residents of a village waste a significant chunk of their lives creating tableaux of famous paintings, from the Mona Lisa to Guernica. None of them like art; it’s just something to do. The results are impressively detailed and utterly, utterly pointless. What a catalogue of wasted lives.

Catching a Replacement Bus Service Home for Christmas: Festive songs if they were realistic

CHRISTMAS songs, all snowfall and merriment, are as realistic as a snowy village where children carol and adults carry armfuls of gaily-wrapped boxes. This is what it’s really like: 

Catching a Replacement Bus Service Home for Christmas

The honest truth about festive travel is you’re dependent on the reliability and efficiency of the British transport infrastructure, which is f**ked but makes up for it by being expensive. Of course your train has been cancelled, what did you expect? The resulting eight-hour bus journey will break you. Take a look at the passenger next to you. They’re just the same.

Simply Having A Traumatic Christmastime

The mood is foul, our spirit’s low. When he vomited out his ditty, McCartney glossed over the logistics of arranging a Christmas which society tells you has to be perfect in every way. Emotionally difficult and wrought with financial anxiety, December would be a lot less stressful if you didn’t have to listen to him playing with the new synth he got from Linda.

It Began to Look a Lot Like Christmas About Four Months Ago

The Celebrations were piled high in late August. By the time the first door of the advent calendar was opened, it had been Christmas for months. Mince pies with best before dates in November had been bought, eaten, regretted, bought again. And you resented every lightly spiced mouthful.

I Wish it Could Be Christmas Once Every Three to Four Years

The trouble with the festive season is that, once you’re past 35, it’s always bloody Christmas. A longer break would make it easier to embrace the festive spirit. If it were like the Olympics it would work: gymnastics and archery, like Love Actually, are great fun every four years but nowhere near good enough to be an annual event.

All I Want for Christmas is Loads of Cool Expensive Stuff

Despite the rhetoric about it being family that matters, Christmas is about consumerism. A new iPad or diamond ring rekindles love more effectively than holding hands in snow. If anyone dared say to their partner ‘all you should want is me, so that’s all you’ve got’ they would swiftly find their gift to be baldly insufficient.

Flying in the Air

Enchanted snowmen don’t exist. Snow barely does. Budget flights to Prague, however, are very real and get you the f**k out of UK. Though the likelihood is that you’ll be Flying in the Air After Thirty-Six Hours in the South Terminal Getting Shitfaced in Wetherspoons and Passing Out in a Departure Lounge. The puddle on the floor will not be melted snow.

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