[title]
The @getinthesea Twitter account triumphed in 2015 by naming and shaming London’s worst trends. From its helm, Andy Dawson picks a few we hope never to see again
The past 12 months have undoubtedly been the worst since planet Earth was invented by Jesus himself right back at the dawn of time. Everywhere you go there’s some chancer, bellend or raging shithouse looking to fill our heads with nonsense, toss and arseholery.
Things have gotten so bad that earlier in the year I founded Get in the Sea – a salty online depository designed to highlight people and things that need to… well, get in the fucking sea, basically. More than 250,000 people are now following this fount of right-thinking modern wisdom on Twitter and Facebook, with an ultimate guide to stuff that belongs in the sea due to published in early 2016.
So, here’s my definitive list of wretched awfulness that should have been dumped in the briny in 2015, never to return and blight our beautiful hearts and minds ever again.
Online petitions
For fuck’s sake, have you idiots still not learned that petitions achieve the square root of fuck-all? Can you name a single major social change that was triggered by a bunch of like-minded people scrawling their personal details on a long list before handing it over to some authority figure?
We’ve all seen those pics of a petition being delivered to the door of 10 Downing Street by its hopeful founders, but we never see a shot of the big burning bin round the back of the house in which all petitions surely go.
Put your petitions straight in the fucking sea instead.
The Cereal Killer Café
Emotions have run high over this milky citadel of foolery throughout the year. Widespread scorn turned to sympathy when masked anti-gentrification protesters lobbed paint at its Brick Lane windows back in September.
But, when all’s said and done, the bearded pair of herberts at the helm of the thing are still knocking out bowls of Shreddies for £3.50.
Try gentrifying the fucking sea instead!
Olly Murs
Enough is enough. The beige reign of this light entertainment tosspot must be brought to an end. Now. Somehow, this grinning Essex chimp ended up co-hosting the nation’s flagship show, ‘The X Factor’, and he made a colossal dog’s dinner of the whole thing. Murs even managed to fuck up a simple two-plus-two sum, announcing a wrong result which turned out to actually be the right result a few seconds later.
Can you imagine him doing a less important job, such as delivering a diagnosis to a terminally ill patient? ‘You’ve got three months to live… no you don’t… yes you do!’
It doesn’t bear thinking about. And that’s why he needs to be cast into the sea forever more.
Kidults
It’s high time that grown-ups started doing a bit of actual growing up, instead of wallowing in some unending childhood fantasy. Londoners have even got their own soft-play venues now – ball pools, slides, climbing frames and probably a breakout area, where the infantalised halfwits can get stuck into one of those woeful adult colouring-in books while drinking juice out of a sippy cup.
You’ve got to be all or nothing with these things – if you’re not fouling yourself in a giant adult nappy, you’re not doing it right.
Get in the fucking sea.
Bear Grylls
Do you know the alternative name that this forest-dwelling elbow-sniffer gives to his alarm clock? He calls it an ‘opportunity clock’. That’s because the word ‘alarm’ gives off a vibe that ‘Bear’ doesn’t care for – he prefers instead to focus on the ‘opportunities’ presented by a brand new day. The fucking knacker.
Wonder if his fucking clock works 20,000 feet under the sea?
Beards
Did we really learn nothing from Mr Twit, execution-era Saddam Hussein and the Yorkshire Ripper? Beards are bad fucking news, everyone. They provide easy-to-grow masks for the shifty and untrustworthy, they’re destroying the razor-blade industry and they make men who can’t grow one feel inadequate and useless.
Believe it or not, they’re even filled with yeast, and a beer brewed using beard yeast hit peak popularity this year.
Why stop there, sickos? Just head straight to the disgusting source instead – go round to his house, give him a few quid and just suck hard on his big, bristly chin wig. Or, alternatively, drag him to the nearest coastline and hurl him and his unsettling beer into the fucking sea.
Clip-on man buns
It’s easy and obvious to say that the average man bun wearer is worse than Robert Mugabe but at least they’ve gone to the trouble of actually growing their locks to the required length for bun-ification. Those who sport the fraudulent clip-on man bun, which launched earlier in the year – had better hope their vile purchase floats, because they’re all going in the fucking sea.
‘Methinks’ dickheads
Stop saying ‘methinks’ in your social media updates – you’re not some kind of jester living in the 1600s, you cunts. Get in the fucking sea.
The half-and-half tree
B&Q have been punting a Christmas tree that is 50 percent real fir and 50 percent synthetic plasticness. Their reasoning is unclear. B&Q need to dump this shit in the fucking sea before they get hurled in there themselves.
Merry fucking Christmas!
‘Get in the Sea! – An Apoplectic Guide to Modern Life’ will be published by Penguin in Feb 2016.