How to stop your partner from playing phone games for five f**king minutes

ALRIGHT, you’re not that fascinating, but your company is less predictable than the 10,000th hour of Tank Wars. Get that phone down with these techniques: 

Make a polite enquiry

Interrupt his Block Blast! flow by passive-aggressively asking questions about his day, the weather, if what he’s doing is important or a waste of a life. Place the correct stress emphasis to help him understand that although these might seem like polite enquiries, they are in fact strict instructions to stop what the f**k he’s doing and pay you attention.

Give practical support

If your partner is on Disney Dreamlight Valley, move over and begin suggesting alternative strategies and admonishing silly mistakes. She’ll be delighted by your presence and grateful for your help. If she continues to make errors, ask her to give you the phone so you can show her how to do it properly.

Create a distraction

Interrupt Wordle with texts asking if it’s okay to substitute yoghurt for fabric softener, or calling a friend to say ‘Yeah the medical results are through. Yeah positive. Yeah I can’t really talk right now.’ In extreme cases, call the police and claim she’s holding you hostage. It’s emotionally true.

Hack his phone with AI

Apparently rogue AI are swarming all over the internet looking for hacking targets, so recruit one and set it on your husband’s phone. Suddenly his game of Alto’s Adventure is interrupted with achievements like ’10,000 hours you’ll never get back played!’ and ‘Congratulations! Your wife hates you!’

Offer sex

Come on to him, which happens so infrequently it’s up there with solar eclipses, and lure him away from the tense, equally matched game of Fibbage. If he’s ignoring actual real-life boobs for an online opponent and a screen, then cut off his cock. It will be a mercy.

Threaten to leave

When a high score is imminent on PUBG Mobile, it has to be stopped. He can’t be allowed that dopamine. Wheel in a suitcase and calmly tell him it’s the game or you. Expect him to choose the game, then change the wifi password from the car outside and wait for the anguished screams as a place on the leaderboard is denied him. Drive away without regret.

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Tasting menus, and other thoughtful gift experiences your parents won't even try to like

PARENTS demand presents but want nothing. Your attempt to treat them to something different will be resented and reviled: 

His driving experience

He was an avid Top Gear watcher and you’ve put up with years of him claiming Lando Norris is shit, so he should love this. Until discovering he now hates modern cars for not being diesel, thinks anything two-seater is for ‘show-offs’ and when he hits the tarmac drives like he’s manoeuvring a Ford Fiesta around Aldi car park.

Their tasting menu

When food isn’t labelled with Prince’s or Hellmann’s it’s already wrong. And this becomes an attempt to poison them when espuma sits on a page that reads like a GP pamphlet. Every fresh course is not gastronomic genius but a fresh humiliation for you, apparently proving the foul local chippie has been unbeatable since 1976.

Her night at the opera

Mum’s bragged about wearing her gladrags and going for a classy night out to all the girls at aquaerobics, but didn’t fully understand it would mean three hours of fantastical nonsense being shouted at her in German singspeil. She sits in complete silence throughout and will never mention it again.

Their murder mystery evening

The perfect gift for a dad who still does Morse impressions and a mum who treats Richard Osman as a religion. But for all the murder night’s pomp, because it isn’t real they’ll say there was too much try-hard over-acting and they thought the other man did it. Other relatives are briefed at length to ‘get us anything except that bloody murder’.

His clay pigeon shooting day

Dad loves war in all its forms, which is why there’s a framed painting of a Spitfire in the lounge and he corrects strangers about the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Does that translate to him enjoying a day shooting a gun? It does not. Apparently, you learn later from your sister, it was ‘nothing but bang bang bang. Space Invaders for idiots’.

Their hotel getaway

Luxury, staff, duck-down pillows and a complimentary high tea. Except first they moan about getting there because it’s miles from a motorway, then they feel the staff are looking down on them, then there aren’t any sandwiches they like, then they ‘couldn’t sleep’ because ‘someone had been in our room’, then they steal the slippers.