2012 is almost upon us. We have a year of closed down musicals, bumped up hotel prices and the Olympics to, uh, look forward to. Before all that we need to address New Year’s Day, specifically the hangover you may or may not get. Even if you’ve been very careful “no, just tap water for me, I’m alternating my drinks” there will have come that moment in the night where you justified to yourself that crappy lager was like water. If you are sensible and don't drink, it is likely you will be encountering someone suffering a hangover. Perhaps between informing them you have no sympathy for them you can read this list out to them and together you can decide the best plan of action. So let’s go through our 5 favourite and slightly unhinged hangover cures.  

I hate pandas. Hate them. I don’t find them aesthetically pleasing and they’re one of the few mammals who are at their ugliest as new-borns. I am pretty sure pandas agree with me, they don’t want to live. They won’t pro-create at their own accord and what really annoys me about pandas is it turns out their stomachs are designed to process meat! They are just overgrown, monochrome fussy bears.

Pandas! There are bears in Canada hopping rides on dustbin trucks they are so hungry! The least you can do is try a little something other than bamboo.

Like dolphins (oh, don’t even get me started) pandas have somehow just managed to get great PR. This has always been my suspicion and the latest BBC magazine’s Faces of the year women’s list has confirmed this with a panda taking the much coveted December spot. Everyone’s after the December spot. Sweetie’s PR has done well. 

We no longer have Christmas to look forward to. TV schedules are back to being ordinary and rubbish until New Year’s Eve, when you totally plan to be out, drinking champagne/cocktails/beer and exchanging bon mots with fascinating people.

These few days between the two main events of winter are usually a little sad. Half your friends and family are back at work, even though those with ‘desk jobs’ will be spending today, Thursday and Friday spinning round in their task chair and surfing the net (hi!) rather than actually working. The other half was clever and booked themselves a short holiday.

To be frank, unless you have very exciting plans for New Year to look forward to then the period between Boxing Day and New Year’s Eve are dull and depressing. Neither one nor t’other.

We are determined to be optimists at Squeamish Bikini however, so here are some reasons to be glad Christmas is over. 

Today is Friday, which means it is the day we put together a list of 5 things and you ask why we keep doing this. But today is a special Friday because it is the 23rd. So if you aren’t all wrapped up (heh) and ready for Christmas by now you are probably best just concentrating on the anxiety fest that is New Year’s Eve.

For this Friday 5, we have decided to make it festive. We have dug deep to recall a time when Christmas was a simple time of pants wetting excitement. Squeamish Ladies and Gentlemen, we give you our 5 favourite Nativity play parts…

Apparently the biggest sign it’s Christmas is not a lit up town centre, or carollers knocking on doors, or even Advent calendar countdowns. It’s the sudden sharp rise in sales of Chanel No.5.

Every year countless men who have been sent away from the M&S lingerie section after trying to convey their girlfriend’s cup size by cupping gestures have solved sizing issues with perfume.  Only they have heard of 2 and Britney’s Curious doesn’t seem quite right for a woman with a job and a flat. Chanel No.5 it is.

According to Debenhams spokesperson Ruth Attridge, “As soon as we see sales of Chanel No. 5 rising, we know that men have begun the race to get their Christmas shopping done”.

This week some of us will be returning to the bosom of our families for Christmas. For some this is a simple trip to the other side of town, for others it is a trek featuring trains, planes and automobiles. I was once stuck in Gatwick airport for 7 hours waiting for a plane home to Brussels. Another time on my way to see my parents for Christmas in Southport my train stopped for so long in Warrington I considered just celebrating there. ‘Right there on the snowy platform with some fellow travellers and a packet of Wotsits’ I thought, ‘this will be our Christmas’. A couple of hours later my train started moving again and I have still never stepped foot in Warrington.

But it’s all about what happens after the journey, however taxing, that really matters. It doesn’t matter how long ago you left home, once over that threshold something happens and we all regress back to being teenagers. It doesn’t matter what you are in the outside world, in this house you’re still [insert embarrassing family nickname here]. Some of the Squeamish writers share their place in the family home…

First of all I love everything about This is England, the film, and the TV series ’86 and ’88. I love any soundtrack that jumps from 99 Red Balloons to a Smiths song. I love that it’s improvised and I love that people constantly answer the front door with no trousers on. I love how it’s shot (if you want to know more about that read this) But most of all I love Smell. 


Oh Smell. In a gang of Skinheads she’s New Romantic, amongst aggressive behaviour she seems half asleep and out of all the gang she asks a 12 year old boy if he wants to suck her tits.

In these more secular times Christmas is many things to many people. A time to celebrate the birth of our Lord (or ‘our Claude’, as my sister and I both misheard and must have wondered why we were celebrating some Franco-Mancunian’s birthday), a time for family, a time for excess or a time for charity.

But this is mostly a time for presents; the giving is usually more exciting than receiving. As capitalism takes a firmer grasp of us all the list of what constitutes a ‘crappy gift’ gets ever longer.

After making the Squeamish writers delve deep, it turns out we’re as shallow as the rest of you and here is our list of 5 crappy gifts…

Hamleys have been in the news this week for stopping its ‘gender apartheid’ of segregating a pink girls floor and blue boys floor. This follows the campaign against Hamleys by the blogger Delilah (real name Laura Nelson) after a disappointing trip to the store.  Delilah wrote, "My request to Hamleys is that it signposts its toys by some other means – for example, what the toys are, rather than who Hamleys assumes they are for".

Some adults (Toby Young) might dismiss this as silly, they are wrong. Toys for children can be organised in by age range, by size or the Dewey Decimal system, but not by gender. To tell a small child what they can and can’t play with is just as stupid as the fictional short story Young trots out about by Saki to prove how futile a more neutral sorting of toys would be.