Do you work in a toxic homeworking environment?

8th September 2023

MILLIONS of Britons are still working from home, but are you trapped in a toxic workplace – in your own house? Here are some telltale signs it might be time to move on.

Bullying

You’ll be doing something important like having your daily mid-morning wank when a co-homeworker walks in and orders you to stop. The same bullying prick – invariably your partner – will shout at you when you eat the last can of beans for lunch, or deliberately talk loudly on their own Zoom call while you’re trying to concentrate on The Wheel of Time. If the bullying escalates to things like stealing your dinner money, inform your line manager, which is you.

Lack of a stable working routine

One day you’re at the kitchen table, the next it’s piled high with yesterday’s dirty plates and you can’t fit your laptop in without sending half-drunk mugs of cold coffee smashing to the floor. So you have to slump down on the sofa with your tablet – again. What next, lying horizontal in bed? It wouldn’t be the first time that’s happened in this badly-run workplace without a facilities management department you can call when you run out of bog paper.

Bad leadership

Every company needs a firm but approachable boss at the helm. Instead there’s just clueless you, frantically clicking on emails to get on a Zoom meeting that started ten minutes ago. Worse, the toxic boss in your head may constantly undermine you with comments like: ‘You’re crap at this, imposter. Get a job more suited to your abilities, like KFC. Oh God, what have you forgotten now, you useless twat?’ Unfortunately you can’t ask HR to have a word with your own subconscious.

No work/life balance

It’s clear to anyone that you’re spending too much time on ‘life’ and really neglecting your work. How are you supposed to knuckle down to work when you drank two glasses of wine at lunch and are still drowsy from your nap? Worse, you’re probably missing out on seeing your office colleagues grow up. Did you miss Graham from marketing’s 42nd birthday party in the office because you were busy with your kids? Time to rethink your priorities.

Zero perks

There are no perks in a toxic homeworkplace. There are no magic markers to steal, and free, slightly-dried-up egg sandwiches during meetings are a thing of the past. No milk magics its way into the workplace fridge, and it turns out nespresso pods don’t replenish themselves. In fact you don’t even have a nespresso machine, despite dropping loads of hints at the workplace Christmas do. Which was crap last year – just your kids opening a load of presents.

How to improve your sex life by comparing it to medieval times

8th September 2023

IS your sex life dull or non-existent? There’s not much you can do about that, but you’ll feel immeasurably better by comparing it to the Middle Ages. Consider these things.

You believed in God

Much is made of church being a social occasion in medieval times. It was, but don’t think people didn’t believe in God. They did, and they were f**king terrified of going to Hell. Sex outside marriage would lead to things like having your eyeballs pulled out with red-hot pliers. That would really take the fun out of blowjobs.

Don’t expect a 32nd birthday shag

You partner might make a special effort on your birthday and – oh, hang on, average life expectancy was 31.3 years so you’ve been dead for eight months.

Your bedroom was also your kids’ bedroom

Ew. Peasant huts were often one room, and even with strategically placed blankets many inquisitive medieval children must have got an impromptu sex ed lesson they wouldn’t forget. Still, it would make ‘birds and the bees’ talks mercifully short: ‘You know that thing your mother and I were doing last night? That’s it. Now f**k off to bed.’

Your bedroom was also your pigs’ and chickens’ bedroom

It wasn’t uncommon to keep a pig or chickens indoors in winter. Nowadays it’s distracting enough trying to do it with the bloody cat in the room, so having six chickens and a goat staring at you must be like starring in a live Amsterdam sex show.

No antibiotics

Even if your sex life is… sporadic, if you do get a touch of the pox at least you can show off your pulling skills to the doctor and it won’t kill you or make your nose fall off. That would really cramp your style, and ‘D’you want to die a horrible death?’ isn’t the greatest chat-up line.

Every wank was terrifying and shameful

Making onanism a sin is one of the most pointlessly cruel things the churches ever did, and they did a lot, but you’d also have been woefully ignorant and would imagine terrible things were going to happen to your private parts. At least these days you can wank yourself senseless on Pornhub and you’ll just feel a bit shamefaced about your taste in MILF porn, not be terrified your knob is going to drop off and roll under your computer desk. Speaking of which…

No porn

Although obscene drawings have been found in the margins of medieval texts, there wasn’t any porn to speak of. For the average peasant the only pictures you’d see would be stained-glass windows of the Virgin Mary or hunky John the Baptist. That really is desperation-level porn, and makes wanking over the underwear section of the Littlewoods catalogue look like a sex party at the Playboy Mansion.

Personal hygiene

Medieval people had more opportunities to get clean than you’d think. Can you imagine paddling into a river for a good scrub nowadays? Not if you haven’t got a deathwish. However, our ancestors would still have been pretty disgusting most of the time. So even if your sex life has lost its spark, at least your partner doesn’t give off a strong whiff of excrement. Well, mostly.

Whoever you’re shagging might just die

Imagine you’d met a peasant you really liked and were totally sexually compatible with. On Tuesday you’re looking forward to snuggling up at the weekend, then on Friday they’re dead from typhoid. Or any number of illnesses no one understood. You’d be gutted, especially if it was ages until market day, which was your only opportunity to meet a potential shag.

You had to get married first

Obviously extramarital sex existed in various forms, but the average peasant had to get married, really. Imagine that now. You’d still be stuck with an earlier partner like that accountant Steve you didn’t realise was a totally boring wanker, or that high-maintenance cow Belinda who was into crystals. The only way to find someone better would be to kill them. On the other hand there were no police or forensics in medieval times, so maybe it was just a case of: ‘I know it’s late, but you really must see the new mill pond, sweetie!’