Tag: comedy

Also, entirely for my own amusement, I also wrote another set of horoscopes which are just… awful. As these were to also fill out my BlueSky account, each one was character limited unlike the last set.

…

Aries: you suspect that neighbour you forgot to put on the Christmas card list took it personally. The first sign is the fact that someone is using your food waste bin as a latrine, followed shortly after by installing a stake pit on your lawn. Expect a fight to the death in late spring.

Taurus: This year you will suffer an escalating series of problems with your arse. It’s not all bad, though, as during the many hours you will spend in the waiting room of a gastroenterologist, you will form new bonds with the similarly afflicted over discussions of your ruined holes.

Gemini: You decide to attempt to better yourself through voluntary work. Though laudable, the attempt is a failure as the charity you select is in fact a secret cult. You do not realise this until the second blood orgy of the year. Also, you get nipple piercings. They suit you.

Cancer: You will be banned from every branch of a major supermarket chain after they misinterpret you becoming trapped in a shopping trolley wedged under the deli counter as an attempt to hide until after closing and steal all the beef mince. You also fall down a manhole.

Leo: You know those disconnected toilets at big home stores? You will be arrested after an “incident” involving one of them. It’s not what you think, though. You will be charged with arson and found innocent after a trial described by the BBC as “the funniest shit we’ve seen this year”

Virgo: You will attempt a difficult task which you have dreamed of doing since you were a child. Unfortunately, the attempt will fail when you are run over by the cab that you booked to take you to the station. You spend three months in a full body plaster cast.

Libra: In a futile, because you’re [already perfect/an unsalvageable trash fire] attempt at self-improvement you take on a new fitness regime. You end the year with a massive neck and the stamina and lower body strength of a toddler.

Scorpio: You will be the first person in human history to be telling the truth when you tell the A&E receptionist that you slipped and fell onto the object currently stuck unreachably far up your arse. No one will believe you, and your X-ray will go viral.

Sagittarius: While digging in your back garden, you will discover an unexploded World War Two bomb. Due to budget cuts, the police will employ a new disposal technique named “Uncontrolled Detonation”. The crater will be claimed by mole people as their embassy to the surface world.

Capricorn: You will make a major purchase (a car, or item of similar value). Due to an administrative error, you are instead sent its cash value in low grade brie. You lose hundreds in cheesy depreciation while trying to correct the error. Also, a heat wave melts quite a lot of it.

Aquarius: Due to a technical mishap and a slight misunderstanding, you will get a full back tattoo of the Cloudflare connection timeout error page. After some further miscommunications, you also get an exchange SMTP failure tattooed on your butt cheeks. Don’t ask where Clippy is going.

Pisces: You will piss yourself at a highly inconvenient moment. Specifically, while operating a public defibrillator. The resultant short knocks out electricity across three counties for a week. You also get a badly singed urethra and £500 from an adult reboot of You’ve Been Framed.

Christmas Bonus: You will discover your festive turkey was used by drug smugglers and contains a full pound of marching powder. You will discover this when grandma starts dancing to EDM and tries to seduce the paramedics. Go Grandma! Just be careful you don’t drop those teeth!

Around the turn of the year, in the hope of establishing a silly little tradition for myself, I wrote another piece of stream of consciousness second person nonsense.

It’s rather fun. I thoroughly recommend it.

…

It is January the 6th, 2025. Your last clear memory is of assembling a ‘Christmas leftovers curry, in a pie case, deep-fried in Yorkshire pudding batter’. You assume the endeavour was a success for three reasons. There is a pan on the kitchen counter containing several litres of congealed fat, the toilet bowl has shattered, and you have no feeling in your anus.

Feeling in need of an early morning pick me up, despite it being a quarter past six in the evening, you open the fridge to find it is filled to the brim with neatly stacked gold bullion. The gold is pleasantly chilled to the touch. Thankfully, nestled between two more gold bars in the fridge door is a single can of special brew, which you drink while you consider what may have led to this situation.

You do some quick maths, based on the volume of your refrigerator, and come to the conclusion that it is highly unlikely that you have legitimately obtained half a billion pounds worth of solid gold. Suspecting that such a loss is likely to have attracted attention, you turn on the television. Your intuition is proven to be accurate, when the first thing you see is a video of an individual riding a quad bike out of the Bank of England, towing a trailer packed with gold. You allow yourself for a moment to hope that the mysterious character is not you, their face being obscured as it is by a highly elaborate protogen mask. 

Unfortunately, the news then shows a zoomed in photograph of an elaborate foreskin tattoo highly reminiscent of Kandinsky’s Composition 8, which you realise is why your bell end is so sore. Any attempt at a reliable disguise will now need to involve an amateur circumcision and several weeks spent in hiding. You sigh and slam the fridge door closed. At this moment, the admittedly impressive structural integrity of the kitchen floor fails, and the fridge falls through the flats of several of your downstairs neighbours, before making an aggressive arrival in the basement utility room. You peer down the hole.

‘Morning, Mrs Stebbins,’ you say, waving politely.

‘Put some pants on you fucking degenerate, I can see right up your arsehole from here!’ she replies, furiously. ‘And see a doctor, for Christ’s sake.’

Since you no longer need to carry the gold downstairs, you finish your breakfast special brew while strolling downstairs to the basement, finalising your plan as you walk. Arriving in the basement, you shovel the gold back into the fridge before closing the door and sealing the whole thing with several rolls of heavy-duty duct tape. The finishing touch of the plan is achieved by taping a pre-paid return envelope (which you received with an unsolicited credit card application) to the fridge door, with a return address of ‘The Bank of England’ written on the back (with your left hand, for security reasons). You then pay someone on an odd jobs website £3.25 to take the ‘parcel’ to the post office. 

Crisis averted, you head out to your nearest branch of Wickes to test out their selection of demonstration toilets. After a spirited debate with the branch manager, you depart, but not without hitching your new quad bike to the tow hook of the car park burger van and driving off with it, staff and all.

So begins 2025.

Horoscopes for the discerning masochist

Aries: In an interesting new cost-cutting measure, the Royal Mail will entirely abandon the concept of delivering unprofitable post such as letters to their intended recipient, instead putting the whole lot through your letter box. You personally. Every day you will be increasingly trapped in your home, first by the endless queue of Royal Mail lorries filling your street, and then by the ever-growing drifts of other people’s gas bills, bank statements and embarrassing letters from the hospital about that problem with their arse that they really don’t like people to know about. Within a few days, you have to claw your way through your own roof to escape a postvalanche. As your flailing arm reaches through the hole, you desperately claw for any purchase, and all you find is a postman handing you a Wickes catalogue.

Taurus: Your luck this year will take the form of a sine wave consisting of dizzying highs and crushing lows. The frequency and amplitude of the luck wave will gradually increase over the course of the year. In January, you will find a £20 note you previously believed lost at a time it is extremely convenient to do so, and will then have to spend a slightly irritating afternoon replacing all the bulbs in your car. By December, you will be alternating on an hourly basis between such events as being nominated for an OBE for services to sex and falling down a 30-storey spiral staircase. In hindsight, you shouldn’t have annoyed that particle physicist, they had a very odd look in their eye.

Gemini: You will stub your toe on a piece of wooden furniture. You believed the furniture was of higher quality than it in fact is, so the inch long splinter that drives itself under your toenail comes as a great surprise. Unable to remove the splinter without passing out from the pain, you take an Uber to the hospital. After waiting 14 hours with no sign of treatment, you catch salmonella from a WHSmith’s prawn sandwich. The hospital declares your undercarriage a biological hazard and has it condemned.

Cancer: Due to an incident of mistaken identity you will be put on the sex offenders register, the no-fly list, several anti terror watch lists, and will have your assets frozen under the Magnitsky Act. You will be initially successful in arranging to speak directly to the new Home Secretary, who will apologise profusely and promise to resolve the situation promptly. Hopefully you return home and, initially at least, they make good on their word. Unfortunately, due to one final bureaucratic mishap you are put on the Dangerous Dogs Act list of banned breeds, and are microchipped and neutered before the mix-up can be resolved.

Leo: You will meet one of your heroes. Someone who you truly respect and admire. You will take a chance and approach them to make some heartfelt expression of gratitude or ask an unusually incisive question. As you approach and make eye contact they see you, realise your intent and begin to smile warmly. However, due to circumstances beyond your control you will simultaneously sneeze directly into their right eye, trip over flinging a boiling hot coffee or soup over them, and piss yourself. Three members of the public will tackle you to the ground until police arrive to arrest you for harassment, assault, and public indecency. The three bystanders will receive a medal for bravery, and you will receive a three-month suspended sentence, six months community service and fines totalling not less than £300. You will also be shunned by this person’s fan base or community after video of the incident goes viral, and your face is plastered over page 7 of a tabloid newspaper. Your mum thinks it’s the funniest thing that’s ever happened, and you suspect she might be right.

Virgo: The squirrels will have vengeance. 🐿️ You know what you did. 🐿️

Libra: Your family and friends will have a year of creative satisfaction, good financial fortune and general good luck. You will not. To be clear, you will not be unusually unlucky… you will just remain at a completely normal baseline level of luck while everyone around you has the low-key best year of their lives. You will start out genuinely happy for them. By the end of the year you will be a seethingly bitter wreck, impotently plotting the downfall of your nearest and dearest, only to see all of your plans come to nothing due to them all simultaneously winning holidays, being taken on a surprise night out to see a favourite musician or being given the day off work for no real reason.

Scorpio: Over the course of the year your employer subjects you to increasingly bizarre and nonsensical policies, directives, emails and meetings, causing you to slowly lose your grasp on objective reality. It begins with things you could simply dismiss as incompetence or carelessness, such as conflicting instructions or incomprehensible emails delivered with the urgent flag at 4:38 on Friday afternoon. Soon it devolves to conference calls conducted in Simlish, and “bring your great-great-grandparent’s skeletons to work day”. By the summer, you haven’t seen a coworker not wearing either a full mascot costume or a worryingly accurate rubber mask of your own face in weeks. The year will end with a ritual in which you ascend to a higher state of existence untethered from the petty constraints of cause and effect. Or someone put something in the water cooler again, you aren’t sure which. Either way, you get “Employee of the Year”.

Sagittarius: You decide to treat yourself to a weekly lottery ticket. You make the mistake, however, of choosing set numbers, meaning you are never again able to stop or skip a week for fear of the giant foam hand of fate bitch slapping you through a plate glass window and bringing your numbers up the one draw you skip. To make things worse, every single week you “win” a prize smaller than the price of the ticket causing you to receive an email telling you that you’ve won the lottery, but not saying how much, and not allowing you to log in to the website to check until the next morning (yes this is a real thing). This backfires and causes you to develop a fetish for extreme edging followed by crushing disappointment. Your junk’s never been so confused and disappointed at the same time.

Capricorn: That weird coworker/uncle/neighbour/friend you are no longer quite comfortable around (delete as appropriate) turns out to be bang on the money on one very specific thing. The government ARE putting chemicals in the water in your area to turn the frogs gay. But not just gay. Semi offensive nineties sitcom stereotype gay. Britain’s waterways become 300% more tastefully decorated almost overnight, and Instagram becomes full of bi people posting pictures of little gay frog couples (even bi people don’t know why bi memes are so full of frogs, but they are. Google it). The only downside is the six hours of 90s club hits blaring out of every pond all summer.

Aquarius: You will discover that someone you have known and trusted for many years is in fact your handler. In response to some unknown event this year, they will read a code phrase to you, activating you and causing your true identity and memories to resurface. You will briefly experience a surge of elation as you are subsumed by your true identity. Are you a secret agent? An assassin? A super soldier? Your last moment of existence is crushed by the horrifying realisation that you are in fact a sleeper ticket inspector for National Express coaches.

Pisces: You will begin work on a new creative project this year. It will take up a great deal of your time and attention, but you will find it greatly rewarding. You will become convinced this can be turned into a marketable product. You will never be more proud of something that isn’t one of your children than the day you put this product on sale. Unfortunately you will then discover due to an oversight in your market research caused by the sheer joy of creation, you are in fact selling an almost 1:1 copy of an existing patented, copyright protected and trademarked product. The crushing disappointment you experience comes second only in horror to the series of lawsuits which leave you living on a wooden pallet, ratchet strapped to the scaffolding holding up Hammersmith Bridge. You have three mortgages on the pallet and live in constant fear of a bailiff confiscating your ratchet straps and sending you plunging into the Thames below.

Dr Danny provides no assurances as to the accuracy of the above, nor does he take responsibility for any consequences should they come about. Dr Danny is also not a doctor.

A fiction piece I wrote upon waking up in the middle of the night, giggling like a child.

…

You awake and look to your watch. It’s 4:27 PM. Your last memory is of opening your seventh magnum of champagne and screaming at the waiter that “no, sir doesn’t want another 11 glasses, this is all for me” before trying to aggressively fuck a cheeseboard that someone put a lot of time, effort and expense into.

What happened between then and now, and why there is Fortnum and Masons Green Tomato Chutney smeared across your tits, is a mystery very much secondary to the fact you appear to be upside down in a vending machine. A fact brought home to you by the angry traveller repeatedly pressing “D5” causing the whirring machine to attempt to corkscrew 3 cans of monster energy up your arse.

Your overtaxed bladder releases and the stream of hot, and somehow still fizzy, piss cuts through the grime on the glass of the vending machine to reveal two things. The first is a crowd of people gathered around a massive video ad screen, which has been repurposed to show news footage of a new viral video. The video appears to be you, attempting to check in to an open vending machine believing it to be a capsule hotel, generously tipping the attendant refilling it, climbing inside and closing yourself in. The view counter currently stands at 2.4 billion. The second thing is the unmistakable, albeit inverted, outline of the Mirai Tower.

You do not have a visa for travel to Nagoya, or indeed any part of Japan, so this is concerning.  Gathering your strength you inhale deeply, clench your entire self, and erupt through the glass of the vending machine, brutally lacerating the vendee and launching a can of monster at near hypersonic speeds into the head of an innocent bystander who (were it not for this event) would have made the developments in material science necessary for the creation of a functioning cold fusion reactor.

As three security guards, a member of the royal Canadian mounted police, and Hachimaru (mascot of the city of Nagoya) chase you, trousers-less, down the street, you consider your predicament. Air travel will be difficult in your current condition.

You escape your pursuers by causing a tanker full of industrial lubricant to overturn, rendering everything within 130 feet “thoroughly lubricated” and thus unsuitable for high speed pursuit.

Sprinting through the city streets to the nearest dockyard, you hide yourself in a shipping container bound for England. For six weeks you subsist on only dry noodle bricks, snorted flavour sachets and rainwater. You wile away the time fashioning an impeccably tasteful suit out of the foil noodle wrappers.

You arrive just in time for London Fashion Week, where you win several awards, before being hospitalised due to a case of constipation so severe that the tattered remains of your anus go on to grace the cover of the British Medical Journal.

So begins 2024.