5 Ways to Avoid a Shit New Year’s

Stay away from your other half

Pre-argument bliss.

This may sound contentious, but will probably save you from having an argument that will cloud your relationship for the foreseeable future. This is because everyone looks forward to NYE so much that even the slightest thing can tip you over the edge, turning it into the one night of the year where you are guaranteed to piss each other off.

Now, whether this is because you drunkenly lost the Pandora bracelet they bought you for your birthday the day before or because they guaranteed to take you a to ‘party’ which ended up consisting entirely of his red-eyed mates and about a dozen baggies, half of which were empty apart from a few droplets of saliva where the dregs had been licked out, you’re going to fall out.

So heed this warning; you only need your partner for the countdown, so avoid them mercilessly until 11:59 and then use them for their lips when the time comes. You won’t regret it.

Don’t drink to beat the clock

And that was just you and a friend.

This sounds obvious but getting so blind drunk that you can’t read which number the countdown is on makes for an incredible evening that you will never remember.

Unlike this student, you actually want to make midnight: “I went to my boyfriend’s mixed birthday/New Year’s Eve party, downed two bottles of wine, chundered and passed out. All before the clock struck 12.”

Sure, being destroyed is fun, but remembering being destroyed is more fun.

Make sure you have no plans for the 1^st

January 1st: the day of the fetal position.

Again, sounds blindingly obvious. But it’s a well-known fact that working on New Year’s Day gets you brownie points with the boss, plus you said to yourself the night before that having work meant you wouldn’t drink too much. This is bollocks. Work, just like lectures, never stopped anyone getting smashed.

If you have to work the New Year’s Day shift on the standing till at Waitrose then you better be prepared to make the stifled run-jog to the bathroom using your hand as a blockade in the vain hope that it might prevent anything from coming out. It won’t; you’ve just made a sieve.

Alongside this is spending the day with family; what’s the point in your Nan cooking a full roast dinner that you can’t eat? Especially when you’ve taken your new boyfriend for the first time; he hates you and won’t stop staring at your bare wrist in an accusative and entirely unnecessary way. It won’t bring it back. That bracelet was lost the minute the clasp was fastened.

Pre-select your midnight kiss

Target acquired.

In a relationship: easy, even if you can taste the angry bitterness on their tongue, barely concealed in the residue of a VK.

If you’re single however, you always have the cop out of the best friend, guy or girl. Or you can use this moment as a daring insight into the mind of your hyperbolic drunken self by ruthlessly selecting the person you fancy. It’s difficult to gauge this though, because they may have other plans and to have the first incident of 2014 being one of utter and complete rejection may lead to a serious onslaught of drunken depression.

To be honest though, when the time comes everyone’s just gonna grab the nearest person; you are purely a mouth-shaped form of social acceptance to them.

Resist the early temptation of the takeaway

Kebab house bants.

When you have been drinking since the early hours of the afternoon, by midnight the drunken feelings of malnourishment in the shape of an unstoppable craving for something salty and hot begin to become unbearable. But remember! You have so much left over Christmas dinner at home.

Nobody wants to be the friend that escorts you to the bathroom because the mayo on your hands is making them feel sick. Curly fries with a side order of lettuce does not mean your takeaway is the healthy option.

It’s easy to stop giving a monkeys once the clock has struck; you’ve had your kiss, so what, you don’t care who smells garlic on your breath. Resist. At least until about 4am (because let’s be realistic, we are all going to be stood around outside the kebab house in the freezing cold waiting to burn our mouths eating far too much, far too repulsively).

“Thanks for the Pandora bracelet!” said a stranger. No problem! Happy New Year’s!

So obey these simple rules and NYE will finally be the night that was promised; no arguments, no rejection, a mild hangover at most and a feeling of smug pride that everyone around you is hurting indescribably and only you know what they did. Rookies.