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Six depressing ways to get into the Blue Monday spirit

IT’S Blue Monday, the most depressing day of the year! But are you celebrating it in the right spirit or ruining it by feeling occasionally cheerful? Follow these tips: 

Go to work

Consider yourself lucky to have a job? Trudge to the office to realise how wrong you are. Not only is your role largely meaningless, but you’re so woefully underskilled that you’re unable to get a better one. Extinguish any remaining glimmer of happiness by looking at your last payslip.

Check your smart meter

You’ve already spunked six quid today and all you’ve done is boil the kettle and charge your phone. How much will you piss away when it hits freezing and you let yourself down by putting the heating on? Energy bills aren’t coming down either. Wholesale gas is. Bills aren’t.

Browse a dating app

Determining your position on the sexual marketplace is unfailingly demoralising. An hour failing to get a match of anyone in your league resigns you to not even being ill-judged one night stand material. In a relationship? A quick scan of hopeless single bios will still bring your mood right down.

Go for a walk

Avoid spending lunch with hated colleagues by nipping out for a quick walk in the freezing cold beneath a sky that resolutely refuses to get lighter. Walk past the closed shops, the charity shops, the vape shops. It begins raining or worse, snowing. Buy a stale sandwich.

Stalk schoolfriends on social media

What’s that freak from maths class up to these days? A quick trawl through Facebook reveals he’s quad-biking in Cuba with his jacked-up physique and gorgeous wife. He probably checks in on your dismal profile to cheer himself up. He’s probably doing it now.

Watch some TV

You’re home. It’s cold. You flick through the offerings on telly, none of which inspire. You plunge into some prestige shit on streaming which transpires to be boring shite. Chasing a quick high, you watch half of Love Island but can’t begin to care, and finish with the slow poison of News At Ten. That was your Blue Monday!

How to feign concern for the NHS: a guide for Tories

ARE you just so worried about the state of the NHS you’re considering the unthinkable, like privatising it? Here’s how to show it: 

Draw attention to all its failings

Waiting lists are terrible, aren’t they? Higher than ever. And patients are being treated in corridors, and in ambulances, and those poor nurses are so overworked and underpaid. Never mention solutions. Just list what’s wrong with an expression of deep sympathy.

Act like it’s a natural disaster

It’s nobody’s fault when you get ill. Similarly, it’s nobody’s fault that the NHS is in the terrible state it’s in. Only vicious ideologues would apportion blame. No, like an earthquake or a tsumani, the absolute wreckage of our healthcare system is just one of those unfortunate things. So much suffering. Such a shame.

Mention its size and cost

Did you know the NHS is the biggest single employer in Europe and one of the largest in the world? That it employs 1.3 million people? That it accounts for 44 per cent of all budgeted government spending? Just leaving those facts there. Up to you if you want to do anything with them.

Casually compare it to other countries

Did you know South Korea is widely thought to have the best heathcare system in the world? Or that Austria’s healthcare is the envy of Europe? Or that US healthcare develops cutting-edge treatments used the world over? No reference to patients paying for it privately is made. It just hangs in the air, unspoken.

Drop in that reform is necessary

Such an innocent word, ‘reform’. Means nothing and therefore everything. And, given the litany of criticisms above, who could deny that the NHS needs it? Who could blame a prime minister whose father was a doctor and whose mother was a pharmacist for commissioning a report carefully including all the right lobbyists?

Never let on this has been a right-wing obsession for 50 years

Plans going back all the way to the 1970s to privatise the NHS? A long-held ambition of every Tory bastard and their donors? Certainly not. Anyway, shut up and let us have this one you selfish malingerers. It’s all we’ve got since Liz Truss f**ked up our no-tax dreams.

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