What we need to leave behind in 2015

Let’s be better


Honest Insta captions

elite-daily-ESSENA1

We don’t need to know how long you spent getting ready for the shot, nor the number of deleted photos it took to get the right picture. It’s always better to be honest, but not for the sake of getting more likes or your photo in the Mail Online. Insta pics of colonic irrigations don’t belong anywhere, let alone in 2016.

Printer/photocopier credits

I didn’t pay £9,000 for this.

Pugs

Pugs are great but by the end of 2015 they were everywhere: on novelty t-shirts, pillow-cases and outside every Tesco Express you walked past. They’re as over-exposed as the Keep Calm and Carry on slogan. Instead, 2016 is the year of the dachshund. Long live the sausage dog.

Handjobs

These are fine as a brief prologue to better things to come, but as the main course? What the fuck is that about? Maybe it’s just me. Maybe I’m a guy who keeps ending up in situations, maybe I have a face which says “just give him a handjob, he’ll be fine with that”. Maybe on the other hand(job) we should just stop, stop with the handjobs: leave it to the guys who can do it better than you can.

Library love letters

George describes her as his “Library Bae”. He doesn’t know her name, doesn’t know how to speak to her. But he knows her scent, the colour of her eyes and could describe the sound her feet makes as she walks across the carpeted floors. When she’s wearing a new jumper, he notices. When she forgets her favourite pen, he notices. One day George, moist “romantic” George writes her a note:

Coffee at 12.15? From the boy in the red jumper… X

And you know why this needs to stay in 2015? It fucking works. They get coffee and they have a long and happy relationship. What happened to looking the other way and never admitting your true feelings?

Tory-bashing

Is there any point in pointing out the obvious?

Anti-feminists

Women who don’t help other women are the worst.

Sombreros, apparently

As Paris burned, as blood was washed from the floor of the Bataclan, as Boko Haram kidnapped schoolgirls, as Libya descended into chaos, as North Korea tested hydrogen bombs, as young black men were shot dead in the street by American police, as Donald Trump went from strength to strength, as you learned all the words to “shut up” – we were reminded what really matters right now – Sombreros are RACIST.

Gym clothes when you’re not going to the gym

Urghhhh and they’re carrying a protein shake holder filled with tap water as well.

Selfie sticks

Most of the Northern Hemisphere got one for Christmas, now charity shops are filling up with selfie sticks after the Christmas declutter. The obvious narcissism that comes with taking a photo of yourself is made even more blatant when you have a big stick to do the job for you. Just ask someone to take a picture of you on Westminster Bridge and they’ll get a better angle anyway.

‘Basic af’

You know what’s become “basic af”? Saying that things are “basic af”.

Grime

He really likes That’s Not Me

Once middle class kids are coming along to Skepta gigs in Palace creps daddy bought them for Christmas, you know it’s probably gone too far. Sorry Stormzy.

Boys proposing in public

See: Library love letters.

Snapchat stories consisting solely of to-camera monologues

Not doing these = major key to success.

Snapchat stories which are just videos of yourself posing (see: Kylie Jenner)

We get it, you’ve landed a new job in a sexy industry with its attendant social privileges and getting-worrying-now coke habit and the only way you think you can show it off is by Snapchatting every single thing you do now. Fine. Good for you. But like, do we really need to see so much of your face? Do we really need a black and white filtered, slow motion selfie video of you drinking an Old Fashioned up the Shard? Probably not.

Vaping

What’s your favourite flavour mate? Jungle Juice? Pear Drops? Yeah, my favourite is a normal cigarette, like a normal person.

Coldplay

We should have left you guys in 2006, am I right?

Cereal cafes

Just because we pitied you when people mobbed your shop, it doesn’t excuse your fucking stupid matching beards.

Craft beer

In 2015, I went to a launch of a douchey craft beer. It was rich, hoppy and just like all craft beers, violently undrinkable. There’s a reason why the Coronas, Buds and Stellas of this world are the best selling beers, it’s because people actually enjoy drinking them. 2016 is the year people stop pretending to like IPA or even pretending to know what IPA stands for.

Bad cocaine

Yeah mate, you saved £20. But your dealer arrives on a bike, your nose is bleeding, and you’ve shit yourself. No thank you.

Green tea

You put milk in it the first time you made it, didn’t you Ettie?

Adult colouring books

Worse than any holistic approach to a broken bone, colouring in between some lines won’t make your life any easier. Struggling to get your brain active to revise? Do a Sudoku. Need a boost of creativity? Draw something yourself. It’s worse than a New Year’s resolution – you simply can’t motivate yourself and I won’t stand here and watch you act like a five year old.

Floods

Tbh if Global Warming means we’ll all be able to grow grapes and make our own delicious wine, this might be worth losing York and Norwich to the sea.

Chia seeds

I’m too scared to say the word “chia” in public for fear of mispronouncing it, so I’m going to run down to Whole Foods and stock up on them for the rest of winter.

Social experiments

Will the sociology text books look back to 2015 as the year we challenged societal norms? No, they won’t, because bad actors making a scene in a public place with excellent camera work isn’t a social experiment, it’s a (really bad) prank. A waste of time for everyone involved.

Ping pong bars

Can I just have a pint with my friends who aren’t European men who work in tech.

Apps described as ‘the Tinder of’

No, I don’t want to swipe left on allotments. I don’t want to swipe through men with beards, nor do I want to swipe left on handymen, party clowns, sausage dogs or second-hand cars. The only thing I want to swipe left on is you calling absolutely fucking everything “the new Tinder”.

Oxbridge

When they’re not accusing each other of sexual assault, or filling up your newsfeed with their matriculation and punting photos, or freaking you out with their weird left-wing politics, or freaking you out with their weird right-wing politics, one thing is so blatantly apparent about the Oxbridge lot that it comes with lights and a buffet and a fireworks display attached: these people really care. And what could be sadder than that.  

Hotline Bling

We all liked it at the start. Drake’s little dance. The fact that he’s weirdly buff. But once teachers start dressing up as him and your dad has watched the YouTube video, doing that weird dancing-on-his-swivel-chair thing, it’s probably a bit dead. In 2015, we dredged up the worst bits of internet culture and brought them to the mainstream. We made Drake, even fucking Drake, a meme. He’s on t-shirts. He’s on Tumblr posts, with thousands of notes, of sassy girls who want to believe they’re the girl in Hotline Bling, the one who wears less and goes out more, drinking champagne on the dance floor, getting rid of the fuckboys.

Drake is so much more than Hotline Bling, grey comfy hoodies and desert boots. It’s time we were honest with ourselves — you skip it on shuffle, and you wish he’d drop the weight and bring out Skepta at Wireless again.

17:38

The funeral will be held at 22 minutes to six this evening.

The laughing tear emoji

It’s all about the key now guys.

Bad sex

We don’t know each other’s names, we met in Pryzm, you made me pay for the taxi and five foreplay free minutes into this you’ve decided to come. And no you can’t “do anal” or “come in my mouth”. Next.

Fuckbois

1.23AM. “You out tonight?” “Nah.” “What u doing?” “Just in bed.” “What would you do if I was there haha 😉 x” He hasn’t even turned on iMessage to do this. He hasn’t even WhatsApped. This fuckboi, who will expect to come round after his night out at Pryzm, do anal and come on your face, has not even turned on his mobile data to reach out to you. That’s your level of importance. He’s liked a selfie four weeks back on your Instagram. He still does “pokes” on Facebook. He jokes about taking you swimming on a first date so you can see what you look like without make-up. Delete his number and leave him in 2015.

Bad eyebrows

There’s been a lot of chat about eyebrows in 2015. About having brows on point, about Cara’s brows, about how to pluck them and where to put the arch, and whether it’s shaming to judge women on their brows (yeah, mental). So it’s baffling, really, that there can be so much chat about eyebrows, such an eyebrow-centric year, if you will, but yet there are still people with really shit eyebrows.

Nah, they’re not supposed to be coal black. They’re not supposed to look like Nike ticks, they’re not supposed to take up 75 per cent of your forehead. Why can’t you just make them look normal? If they come off on your pillow case, you’re doing it wrong. If they come off on the person you’re getting off with, you’re doing it wrong. If you’re honestly thinking you can pluck them to death in your Blazin’ Squad halcyon days of ‘07 and then paint them on like Cara over your tadpole strands and convince everyone – you’re fucking wrong.

Banning everything and everyone on campus

Milo Yiannopoulos (left): Probably not welcome at your uni

Germaine Greer, Maryam Namazie, Milo Yiannopoulos – it’s time to stop closing our eyes and covering our ears when confronting someone or something a minority find disagreeable. The whole point of university is to learn, argue and say what you think without worrying about the backlash. The only thing to no platform in 2016 is No Platform.

People getting angry at Pret

Gentrification is a fact of life. The people who get angry at Pret are the sort of people who get angry at hipsters, cereal cafes, people avoiding tax and the lack of gay pubs – even though they’re not gay. They can’t handle change and want everyone to know about it. How did the place they live in become the way it did? They stand up for issues which don’t directly affect them, guilty of their middle-class upbringing in Muswell Hill and regurgitating anything they read in the Guardian earlier that week.