How to bollocks up your Christmas shopping

READY to spend the last few days before Christmas in a blind panic for gifts and food, online or in real life? Here’s how to end up with none of the stuff you need.

Raid your supplies

Eat all the chocolates, mince pies and even essentials like the pigs-in-blankets. If you’re very weak-willed, roast your turkey while pissed one evening to make a delicious pile of sandwiches. Then have a coronary rushing round the shops to replace it all.

Be selfish

Is your girlfriend totally uninterested in computer games? Clearly you should buy her a Nintendo Switch. Also a great way of catching up on your viewing, eg Tenet on DVD for your mum who wanted the new Mary Poppins.

Leave it till the last millisecond

Everyone knows the Christmas consumer orgy gets more and more frenzied right up until the shops are locked on the 25th and the staff help themselves to whatever they want for free. Ignore this and be surprised when Christmas dinner is a pack of sliced ham, microwave chips and watery tinned carrots from Happy Shopper.

Planning is for twats

Buy randomly to get it all wrong, for example 20 boxes of biscuits but no gravy or potatoes. Don’t make lists, ensuring the uncle you never see gets an expensive scarf and gloves, while your own wife makes do with a white Toblerone.

Make regrettable impulse purchases

Amazon or eBay, ideally. A light-up holly wreath, nylon Santa hats, a vastly overpriced bottle of port, or a digital camera for a mate who’d have been happy lager. If it’s expensive and adds nothing to your festive enjoyment, buy it now.

Lose all sense of proportion and get insanely stressed-out

If you are causing irreparable damage to your relationship with a blazing row about forgetting to buy brandy butter, you are bollocksing up your Christmas shopping superbly.

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Why all this is fine, by a Brexiter

by Roy Hobbs, 2016 Leave voter

BORIS? Doing a great job. Covid? Nothing to worry about. Brexit? Setting us free as a nation mate. Let me explain:

Food shortages? Sorry you won’t be able to get purple basil for your pancetta-wrapped sea bass. I take a limited diet of Wall’s sausages and oven chips which my triple-locked pension easily covers. Why do people keep complaining about things that don’t affect me?

I’m not afraid of some deadly virus. People accuse Leavers of burying their heads in the sand and using stupid analogies, but we got through the bubonic plague, didn’t we? And Vesuvius.

What people don’t realise is that literally nothing matters except Brexit. Boris may not be quite the panel-show Churchill I thought he was, and actually just a fat, spoilt parasite, but you’ve got to put it in the context of Polish shops. There’s one in the town 30 miles away where my sister lives. And I don’t like the sound of mosques.

Brexit will solve these and our many other problems, such as the French. Food supplies cut off? Bring back the Atlantic convoys. That went well and in any case we can easily grow our own food. Turnips are very nutritious.

The government is doing a fine job in difficult circumstances. Excuse me, my wife has just texted to say there are no Brussels sprouts in Tesco. Oh God, I think I’m having a panic attack.

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