Six self-love tips to make you hate yourself this New Year

2022 is finally here, so it’s time to start being kind to yourself and learn to love who you are. Here are six pieces of advice guaranteed to backfire:

Strengthen yourself

Sport isn’t just a way to lose weight and become healthier and more centred. It’s also a way to discover you’re a lazy arsewipe with zero tolerance for pain. If you want to test your self-loving-self to the limit, get a personal trainer and hemorrhage cash and self-respect.

Nourish yourself

What better way to show you care about yourself than raw spinach for breakfast? Swapping out chips for steamed broccoli? What could be more soul-crushing than not making it 24 hours before the sugar low makes you crash so hard you realise you’re living life from one Leibniz biscuit to the next?

Pamper yourself

If you really want to worship yourself, why not max out your credit card with a spa day? A perfect way to relax in the presence of your physical flaws: that tummy flab beneath the jacuzzi bubbles, those toenails that make the pedicurist gag. Your self-loathing will be fresh and new.

Meditate on yourself

Just ten minutes of meditation a day is enough to make you realise both how tired and how impatient you are and, underneath it all, that you’re kind of a bad person. Before your 600 seconds are up you’ll be wondering how in hell you’re supposed to ‘love’ someone like you exactly?

Immerse yourself in nature

Don’t overthink it, get out the house for a stroll in the fresh air… except the air in your grimy suburb is a long way from fresh and it’s f**king freezing. You’ll last maybe 20 minutes and you’ll get dogshit on your new running trainers.

Take pride in yourself

It’s so important to take the time to remind yourself how great you are, just as you are. But when you’re still staring at a blank page searching for shit to be proud of after half an hour it’s not looking or feeling good. You don’t go out of your way to hurt people? Is that good enough?

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The seven shittest Christmas number ones of all time

IT IS a tradition as British as the Queen’s Speech to send an absolutely shit song to number one for Christmas. These are seven of the worst:

Ernie (The Fastest Milkman in the West), Benny Hill, 1971

In the 60s Elvis, the Beatles and Tom Jones were at the top at Christmas. Our tradition of novelty crap for Christmas began here, with an innuendo-laden number about rival deliverymen vying for a widow’s love. Easily as bollocks as it sounds.

There’s No-one Quite Like Grandma, St Winnifred’s School Choir, 1980

This beat John Lennon to number one just after his death, if you want a marker of what twats we’ve always been as a country. Though it could have just been because it was a cheap, and ironic, present for Grandma.

Earth Song, Michael Jackson, 1995

Did we all know about the child abuse allegations at this point? Yes. Did we buy this anyway? Yes. An overblown epic with a climate change message hammered home by Jacko travelling to four different continents to shoot the video. Its only saving grace is Jarvis Cocker mooned him while he performed this at the Brits.

2 Become 1, Spice Girls, 1996

Now considered a seasonal favourite even though it’s unambiguously about getting your end away. The first of three festive chart-toppers by the talent-light group but the only one where you can close your eyes and imagine it going in.

Can We Fix It?, Bob the Builder, 2000

Along with Mr Blobby, the child-friendly Christmas number one you’d love to forget. Irritating, stupid, sold over one million copies. Best listened to after sustaining a catastrophic head injury on an unregulated building site. 16 years later the same instincts that made this a success would bring us Brexit.

Do They Know It’s Christmas?, Band Aid 20, 2004

The original wasn’t great, the Stock Aitken Waterman reboot five years later was worse, and this featured a veritable ‘who the f**k’s that?’ of 00s music. The luminaries caterwauling along included Dido, Lemar, Estelle, Turin Brakes, Busted and Keane. Yeah.

Don’t Stop Me Eatin’, LadBaby, 2020

It’s hard to criticise a record released for charity. Not impossible though. Ladbaby has notched five Christmas number ones in a row, all themed around sausage rolls and like sausage rolls, absolutely packed with arseholes. At least the first two had decent puns. This one? Shit.

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