The British person's guide to perpetual victimhood

ARE you convinced your life in a fairly average part of Britain is a waking nightmare? Here’s how to get the most out of your imaginary victimhood.

Be livid about trivial things

Has the council sent you a leaflet nagging you about not putting food in the recycling bin? This is a personal insult as bad as calling your wife a fat cow or saying your car is ‘gay’.

Appear not to have a television or the internet

For example: if you live in the North, strongly believe there is no poverty in London or the South East. Places like Jaywick don’t exist, and the latest London gang violence was probably a turf war between rival merchant bankers.

Stay well-informed about your victimhood

Recommended media include: the Sun, Express, Mail, Telegraph, Brexit Facebook pages and deranged blogs with titles like ‘The Last White Man in Hereford’.

Hate anyone with a different job to you

Even if you’re comfortably off, assume everyone else is on a permanent skive while earning a fortune. Don’t bother to ask why doctors might earn more than an electrician. Everyone knows ‘daddy’ got them the job by putting a word in.

Everywhere else is amazing

Don’t limit yourself to hating the South East – imagine that Manchester is a pretentious big city awash with public cash. Probably Hastings too. It sounds posh anyway.

Use a strange definition of ‘victim’

‘Victim’ usually refers to people with actual problems, eg. they’ve been run over or murdered. Clearly this is nonsense – real victimhood is seeing an ethnic minority person doing the weather on TV.

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The six properties you'll be horrified by when looking for a houseshare

LOOKING for a new place? Can’t afford blissful isolation? Then you’ll be recoiling in horror at what other people call home:

The animal house

What could be better than living alongside cats, dogs, rabbits and whatever squats malevolently in that vivarium? Yes, you’ll be constantly covered in hair, spend hundreds on takeaways rather than prepare food in that kitchen and worst of all will get used to the smell, but that’s all part of the fun.

The hippy house

Welcome to nirvana: there are guitars on the walls, buddhas everywhere and a general house ethos of ‘do whatever housework you’re comfortable with, man’. The wind chimes may well drive you insane before the condescending lecture about how you need to relax. Namaste.

The weirdly Ikea house

Let he who is without wonky flatpack furniture cast the first stone, sure, but this place is just unsettling. You’re either in the home of a tightwad with no imagination, or you’ve bumped your head in a branch of Ikea and gone into some sort of site-specific coma.

The mouldy basement flat

Not sure if subterranean living is for you? As you’re long as you’re not overly worried about damp, don’t mind respiratory problems and treat black mould on every wall as back-to-nature home decor, you’ll love it here.

The stoner house

What’s that smell? Nope, not the four sticks of incense burning simultaneously, the fragrance it’s supposed to be masking – ah, weed. Welcome back to a world you last lived in at university and had not missed.

The something-went-down-here house

The decor’s nice, it’s bright and there’s even a garden, but there’s a nagging sense of something very, very wrong. Did they have an argument just before you arrived? What happened to the previous occupant? Did someone get murdered here? Run.

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