Congratulations! You've completed January

CONGRATULATIONS! You’ve completed the hardest January any of us are ever likely to experience.

Locked-down, flat broke, with no Christmas or New Year to look back on fondly, the month has been hell for everyone, but it ends today. If you’ve been doing Dry January you deserve extra credit, you masochistic weirdo.

Whether you’re on your own in a one-bedroom flat, juggling homeschooling three kids and a high-powered job, or out there working on the frontline, the last 31 days have ticked slowly and painfully by.

It didn’t matter if it was Monday morning, and you were slumped in the corner working on your laptop, Wednesday evening, and you were slumped in the corner working on your laptop because you’d spent all day doomscrolling Twitter, or Saturday and you were slumped in the corner on your laptop out of habit, this month sucked.

No month has ever been longer. No month has ever been more featureless. No month has ever offered such a shitty range of entertainment options, ie. it’s Sunday so let’s go for yet another muddy walk around the same patch of grass.

But you made it. Day by day, you battled your way through a January without friends, without family, without pubs, without any of the things that make life worth living. And survived.

Congratulations! Your reward is February. It will be almost exactly the same.

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'Living in your head rent-free' and other unbearable modern phrases

EVEN in lockdown it’s impossible to avoid the latest bullshit phrases. If only scientists could eradicate these…

‘Sorry, not sorry’

Not only a non-apology but one that’s incredibly irritating. Have you panic-bought 500 rolls of bog paper? ‘Sorry, not sorry’. Taken the family to Ibiza during a pandemic? ‘Sorry, not sorry’. ‘I am smug, selfish bastard’ would be refreshingly honest by comparison.

‘Living in your head rent-free’

This nonsense basically means ‘letting someone or something dominate your thoughts’. Not very snappy but at least it’s less confusing than this oh-so-trendy phrase used in everything from Twitter spats to gloating over beating your mate at Fantasy Football. Donald Trump has been known to say it. Think about that before you use it.

‘Legit’

This slang term is now being used in front of words like ‘good’ or ‘bad’, as in ‘Have you seen Succession – that show is legit good.’ Well done people, you have created a phrase that is both new, redundant and truly annoying as f**k.

‘Living my best life’

Nauseating to begin with, but now pretty ridiculous because we’ve all been trapped indoors for a year. Although many who use the phrase have just been ignoring the rules and adding tags on Instagram posts like #livingmybestlife and #sociallydistancedchampers for good measure.

‘OK, boomer’

What started as an interesting comment on the pressures facing millennials has quickly become a bad sitcom catchphrase meaning ‘I disagree with you, older person’. Also it helps if you actually find out what a boomer is instead of saying it to anyone over 28.

‘I did a thing’

A real social media favourite, this is a way to both boast AND underplay the fact that you’ve written a book, finished a play, or whatever. See also: ‘I’ll just leave this here.’

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