How To Get Rid Of Your Friends

It has been too long since last I updated this blog and I genuinely feel bad about this. The cloud of busyness I stumbled into around late March has yet to fully dissipate. <Insert predictable joke about volcanic ash here.>

In order to ensure future updates are slightly more timely, I’m considering moving into a castle, perhaps with some form of moat. <Insert predictable joke about MP expenses here.>

Anyway, in order to keep this relevant to real life (mine, not your’s), I thought I’d try and explain what I should have done weeks ago if I genuinely cared about you, lovely blog readers. Yes, to keep FTBD ticking over, I should have long ago ditched all the “friends” who distract me from updating it. How? Well…

Offensive Jokes

I gather I have acquired a reputation for these. So clearly this isn’t a good tip for ditching your chums, as I still have them. But I guess I only make the really horrific ones when I know the audience will let me get away with it.

See, if I really wanted to jettison all distractions, I should start doing this indiscriminately. No business meeting or conversation with an elderly relative should be safe from a reference to bloody death, bodily fluids or bowel movements. (Especially the latter. It’s funny because it’s poo!)

I am due to give a speech in September, as best man at my best friend’s wedding. I gather this is being feverishly anticipated among our mutual friends as the day I am beaten to death by a lynch mob of offended relatives and fans of classy anecdotes.

Stand Them Up

Last week, I double booked myself a few times, through sheer bad memory. Usually, I realised within a few minutes/hours and corrected the issue. But… what if I hadn’t?

Seriously, think about it. If you want to thin out the herd of your friends, without having to do anything whatsoever: arrange stuff with them, then don’t turn up. Give only extremely unconvincing excuses, or mumble something about “forgetting”.

Doing this to someone once will put a black mark against your name for a while. Become a serial lurch-leaver and you will be lucky if anyone ever talks to you again.

Extreme? Maybe. But these things are necessary if you want to thin the herd without resorting to mass slaughter.

Mass Slaughter

Kidding. <Insert predictable joke about Holocaust here.>

Bad Things

The above options will get people to avoid you through simply appearing to be undesirable company. But, if that doesn’t work, you might have to turn nasty and go on the offensive against those who use up your valuable blogging time.

Y’know, by punching them in the face, stealing their stuff, involving yourself sexually with their friends/family/ex, keying their car, teaching their dog to crap indoors, teaching their child some jokes about rohypnol for the playground, borrowing their stuff and throwing it in the sea, offering to fix multiple things for them and breaking them all “by accident”, documenting their sordid secrets on your blog/Twitter/billboard in Leicester Square… that kinda thing.

I should probably include some disclaimer to any real life friends reading that, yes, I do love you all really. Despite all the dubious jokes. But they’re probably all used to this kind of grumpy rambling from me by now anyway.