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Five times of the year more wonderful than Christmas

DESPITE the song’s claims, Christmas isn’t the most wonderful time of the year. It barely scrapes into the top ten. These occasions are far more wonderful: 

Pay day

For a weekend you’re rich. Buying pints for strangers, throwing lavish parties with crisps in bowls, eating at the best restaurants available like Nando’s and Pizza Express. Then your various direct debits come out and you’re back to haunting the Whoops! aisle like a malnourished ghost. But for those two days you lived like a king.

When your car passes its MOT

The driver’s door doesn’t open when its cold. The windscreen washers haven’t squirted since June, 2018. The weird squeaking sound is still there, and it doesn’t like to corner at above 30mph. Your car is f**ked, but miraculously the garage calls mid-morning and it’s passed! You can squeeze another year out of it! Hallelujah!

When your kid’s on a sleepover

Not at your house. That’s an evening of Netflix on your phone on the toilet. But when your kids are at some other luckless knobhead’s you’ve got a stress-free evening for you and your partner to spend quality time together. To talk, to rediscover the magic of your relationship, to make love. Or at least to stay up past midnight.

Good Friday

The two days off at Easter are far superior to the two days off at Christmas. You can’t go the pub at lunchtime on Christmas Day for ten hours without annoying repercussions like children crying and divorce, but Good Friday has no such restrictions. You only have to buy eggs. You don’t have to see family. EastEnders doesn’t kill anyone. It’s great.

When it’s not winter

Any day when it’s not winter is better than any day when it is. You can get up in daylight. You don’t wince when your feet touch the kitchen floor. You don’t have to wrestle into three layers to defrost the car. One day, Christmas long behind you, you’ll realise you’re outside in a T-shirt, flowers are blooming and soon you’ll be bitching about how sodding hot it is.

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I thought they were friends. But make £60 million profit out of a national crisis and they turn on you

by Baroness Mone OBE, the bra, weight-loss, fake tan, cryptocurrency and personal protective equipment multi-millionaire

RISHI, Boris, Michael Gove – I thought these people were friends. Allies. But make a mere £60m profit from a national crisis and it’s a different story. 

Back in 2015? They couldn’t get enough of me. Blonde, Scottish, working-class origins, successful in the sexy tabloid-friendly bra business, ministers were queuing up. I only accepted a life peerage because Cameron wouldn’t stop asking.

Yes, there was that brief blip when I was invested in a tax avoidance scheme George Osborne called ‘morally repugnant’ and he’s hard to disgust, but I blamed it all on my then-husband and got away clean. Useful tactic incidentally.

The government loved me. I was against Scottish independence, I loved Brexit, we were best mates. Boris would call every other day just to pant wordlessly until he was finished.

And now? Not one call’s being answered. Not even Gove, and he normally answers within two rings in case it’s his dealer. Suddenly I’m a pariah just because of some dodgy PPE.

I thought we were Tories together? All following the same rule that no matter what happens, it’s our duty to make a profit out of it?

All I did was what any of us would; abused my connections, slapped a massive mark-up onto clearly defective goods, and hid the money in an offshore trust. And I’m the bad guy?

It goes to show you can’t trust anybody and friends aren’t worth shit. Never mind. I’ll always have that £60 million.

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