New year, new entrepreneurial projects for me, a person with hours to spend lying awake before sunrise , a mortgage so big it crashes Gmail, mouths with expensive tastes to feed, and also a cat. Products launched in 2019 must be waste-free, essential, existential, providing something that can’t be bought on Amazon, and under £40. Allow me, please, to pitch…
Urban Anxiety for Rural Life scented candle
So they moved to the country. And they love it! They totally love it. They love the space, they love the air, they love the walk to school along a muddy path, saying hello to the horse and the dead lamb, Lamby. They love connecting to nature, you know? They love the huge skies and the lack of sirens and the house they bought for the same price as a one-bedroom flat in Brighton. They love the neighbourliness, they love the change of pace, they love the way their kids will know the value of a potato. It takes a while to get to what they really want, because there’s still “how surprisingly quick it is to get here from the city” and their plans for a “funky beer” festival to get through but, eventually, after a brief but weighty pause, there it is. For only £39.99, you can offer your country-dwelling friends Urban Anxiety, presented in an elegant reusable tumbler. Invite them to inhale the threat of knife crime, the pressure of a round of drinks, a friend of a friend who knows a good dealer, the crush of a shopping mall on a Sunday, and the price of a coffee there afterwards. A stag night on a train after 9pm, the hacking cough of a polluted kid, the raised voices of people who agree with each other, the eternal proximity to a B-list celeb. Through the scent of urine and strawberry cheesecake vape fumes, they will be transported gratefully to their inner-city dweller. Use a wick trimmer for a perfect burn.
Another 10 Years to Decide Whether They Want a Baby gummy chew
It’s obvious they’re too young for this. Their body might be puckering, drooping, softening and dry, but their mind… their mind is pubescent. It sees snow and it wants to draw a dick in it. It sniggers at fart sounds. It wanders to what’s for tea when it’s reading about politics. It has trouble working in a group. There is no way, absolutely no way, they should be allowed to operate a child. They simply haven’t had the training. And yet, whomph, here it is: their 30s, an unbaked cake for a brain, a libido still screaming through their shirt like a caged coyote, commitment issues the likes of which psychiatrists would run each other over to document, unplaced ambition, empty pockets, failure to succeed, and also, waning fertility. What sweet madness is this, and how can we fix it? Here is the answer, and it’s cherry flavoured.
You Don’t Have to Finish this Book voucher
The character names are too similar, the historical setting is grim and syphilitic, the plot is complicated, especially when read in 20-minute chunks on the train to work and you keep having to flick back to the family tree at the beginning – no. Here is a one-time opportunity, a get-out-of-jail-free card, for a novel that everyone bloody loved, but the reader just can’t get into. It can be used at any point throughout the year and throughout the book. If they open it to find a carefully drawn map of the fantasy land they are about to enter, they can use the voucher. If they get distracted by the love interest’s similarity to their mother, they can use the voucher. If they can see the ending coming from page six, they can use the voucher. No shame, no questions, goodbye.
1 x Empathy Minibreak
Available in blocks from one day to one month, these passports take us on a holiday from caring. Whether news reports about child poverty, the plight of Syrian refugees, their brother’s sticky divorce or the woman they give £1 to outside Tesco, an empathy minibreak offers relief from other people’s problems, for a limited period. A friend is feeling sad about her ex. And? Their son wasn’t picked for football. So? Racism, sexism, ageism, homophobia, transphobia, antisemitism – sad face. Imagine the delight at not having to feel anything (please see website for terms and conditions) over these cold winter weeks. Imagine the joy at reading the headlines and thinking: blank. Here is the product for the person who has everything, and because of that, feels absolutely awful about it. Guilty and restless and impotent and scrabbling, their charity donations like snow falling in summer, their shoulder permanently screwed now after a thousand friends have cried on it. To offer this, this freezing of empathy, is to say, you have done your time. They will be ready to reenter this terrible world once their break is up refreshed and cleansed. Price on application.
One more thing…
You have less than three weeks to catch Christian Marclay’s The Clock, at Tate Modern. It’s a 24-hour installation made of thousands of film images of clocks, edited together to show the actual time. Watching with my four-year-old, we were lucky enough to catch a heaving sex scene. ‘What’s he saying to her Mummy?’ she whispered noisily. It’s around half past four, if you’re interested.
A study shows that out of the top-grossing movies between 2014 and 2017, those starring women earned more than those starring men, and those that passed the Bechdel test did much better than those that did not. I knew it!
Is this our last New Year’s Eve in Europe? Let’s all enjoy the most debauched party, stereotype-themed. Shagging like the French, gorging like the Italians, drinking like the Spanish, cleaning up like the Germans… Let’s wrap ourselves in the flag and dance until March.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on Twitter@EvaWiseman
