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The six arsehole parents at your child's nativity play

ATTENDING your child’s nativity play, even though he’s a mere shepherd for the second year running? Distract yourself with fury at these twats: 

The amateur videographer

Down the front with an actual camera, even though whole films are shot on iPhones now. Will take up a kneeling position to make sure every moment of their little darling’s performance as Balthazar is captured. Comfort yourself by imagining the sheer, crushing boredom of watching a screening of it on Christmas Day.

The chatty bastard

You have no idea who this is – that dad who you used to grunt at on the school run? – but he won’t shut up. Not during the ride into Bethlehem, not during the innkeeper bit, not during the songs. The glares of other parents make it clear you’re guilty by association just for nodding along. Which child is even his? Does he have one?

The entire family

Mum, dad, kids, a baby and both sets of grandparents? Taking up two entire rows? Leaving you stuck at the back, hardly able to see your son? Though they do provide a useful human wall so he can’t see you sink into despair as he forgets his one single f**king line, which is ‘Hark! An angel of the Lord!’

The costumier

Shepherd’s outfit £12 on eBay? Buy It Now and job done. It’s a bit disappointing? Should match the production then. But while your child takes the stage in his slightly soiled fire-hazard outfit, her daughter’s hovering above the stage in full angel regalia complete with light-up halo and battery-operated celestial wings. Making you look the inferior parent you are.

The parents of Mary and Joseph

Well done, your kid’s cute, can remember lines and has no history of soiling themselves. They got the main part. You’re very proud, which is why you got here an hour early and have the whole front row. You know what happens to kids who get picked to be Mary or Joseph? They’ve peaked now. The rest of their life will be a slow decline. Good.

The wild enthusiast

Unfathomably excited to be here while you’re watching the clock run down. ‘Isn’t this wonderful?’ she coos, about a theatrical experience one step down from a public hanging. It’s when she joins in on Away In A Manger you begin to worry. Wait, she’s not… religious? She doesn’t believe this whole Nativity thing actually happened, does she? Awkward.

Cultural event of the year was one millionaire rapper calling another one a paedo

THE cultural event of the year, according to august commentators and heavyweight intellectuals, was when that one rapper called the other one a paedophile. 

Serious people who think about art seriously while steepling their fingers beneath their chins have agreed that Not Like Us, the song containing the accusation, is comparable to the premiere of The Importance of Being Earnest in terms of its cultural impact.

Professor Thomas Logan, a doctor of literature at Cambridge, said: “The moment when Kendrick Lamar said ‘Hey Drake, I hear you like ‘em young,’ galvanised the arts like no other. There is now only before Not Like Us and after it. It changed everything.

“The sheer weight of incisive dialectic cannot be denied. In literature there is Shakespeare, Dickens, Joyce and now Lamar, who for me has surpassed all of them.

“When he said ‘Certified Lover Boy? Certified paedophiles’ was the moment was when the rest of the Western canon became redundant. Every newspaper, music publication and the Grammys committee agrees. This track was humbling, edifying and vital.

“This is the high point of all art in the 21st century. Our Picasso, our Welles, our Tolstoy. When history remembers, it will remember Not Like Us. All else will be a footnote.”

He added: “That unpleasant man who called me a paedophile on Twitter? No, that was base, cheap and unwarranted. Not comparable even in jest.”

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