How to completely waste your Saturday morning

SATURDAY mornings are precious oases in an otherwise cruel world. Here’s how you waste this sacred time each and every week.

Do a park run

What could be a better start to the weekend than a swift 5k run on a Saturday morning? Answer: anything. After five minutes of shuffling your way around the park you’ll develop a stitch and need to keel over on the ground to be sick. Look forward to your body being seized up until you’re back at work on Monday morning. At least you got an Egg and Cheese McMuffin on the way home.

Be hungover

Celebrating the end of the working week by getting shitfaced seemed like a good idea last night, but in the cruel light of Saturday morning you’ll wish you were dead. You could be tucked up in bed watching TV, yet here you are, hunched over the toilet and begging for the room to stop spinning. Look forward to making this same mistake every week until your liver packs in.

Host a kids’ sleepover

One of the many downsides of having kids is that at some point they will want to invite friends round for a sleepover. During the week it’s all you can do to get them up in time for school, but come the weekend they’ll be up at six, loudly making breakfast, playing Call of Duty at max volume and asking for a lift into town. Will other parents offer to return the favour and give you some peace? No.

Visit a car boot sale

If you want to snap up some second-hand junk that isn’t completely useless you need to get to a car boot sale at the crack of dawn. After hours of browsing you’ll realise there’s nothing decent on offer, but you can’t come home empty-handed so you’ll buy a fiver’s worth of random shit. All of which you’ll attempt to flog at a car boot sale in a few weeks because you’re desperate and skint.

Do the big shop

Saturday morning is the best time of the week to do the big shop, right? Surely you’ll be the only tragic bastard pushing a trolley around? Guess again. The aisles will be filled with shuffling hordes of coffin dodgers who stagger through the doors as soon as they open. They’re slow, they’ll get in your way, and once you’ve finished queuing behind them it’ll be past lunchtime. Order everything online next time like a normal person.

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The complete f**king mess your parents have made of their new smart TV: a troubleshooting guide

YOUR parents have taken the plunge and bought a new smart TV. Within days it’s f**ked, and they want you to fix it. Here’s how:

‘Loss of signal’ message

Your parents are from the age where every electrical device had to be unplugged at bedtime, so they don’t realise that the broadband hasn’t finished connecting before they switch the TV on. No matter how many times you explain this is why they’re seeing the ‘Loss of signal’ message they refuse to leave the hub on overnight, in case it burns the house down or electrocutes the budgie.

Squashed display

Modern TVs default to widescreen, so if your parents are watching Dad’s Army in a mid-screen stripe with the head and legs cut off Captain Mainwaring then one of them has been recklessly pressing buttons trying to fix it. But it’s not their fault, it’s the TV’s for being from Japan and refusing to show ‘proper British television’.

Subtitles

Your parents are hard of hearing so the TV is on full volume, while relaying audio description, signing for the deaf and subtitles in Greek. They have put up with this for several days before calling you after gradually becoming irritated with the signer ‘waving all time’. You could go over and correct these issues, but then they’ll just moan they want them back.

Deleted apps

You spent a full afternoon creating accounts for them on streaming apps, which have now disappeared. They say the fault lies with the remote control, as the buttons are too small and sensitive. Sadly, you know a voice-activated remote will not solve the problem, unless it’s capable of discerning commands punctuated with ‘ruddy’, ‘god forsaken’ and other more inappropriate phrases from a less inclusive era.

Every setting on 100%

Watching your parent’s TV takes you on a wild out-of-body psychedelic experience due to the contrast, saturation, colour and brightness being set to maximum. You consider adjusting it but decide not to, as perhaps they want to spend their twilight years feeling like they’re tripping their tits off to the magic telly.

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