How to Kill Your Family

by Bella Mackie

The man was handsome in a somewhat generic way, and obviously keen to strike up conversation, but I could already see that he was on the turn. The hair will go first I imagine, and then the jowls will set in.

It is one of life’s great pleasures to eat without anyone talking to you. What could be worse than a bad date with good food?

Liking Goodfellas over all other films means the man has never bothered to cultivate a personality.

Funny how thirty minutes with colleagues can feel like an eternity and two happy hours with just your own thoughts can pass by in a flash.

Never be kind to men who seek to engage you in conversation. Even a polite brush-off comes off as a challenge.

I very much subscribe to the adage that nothing good happens after 2 a.m.,

One man had a gym-honed body, in that vain way that suggests he spent a lot of time creating the appearance of strength but likely meant he had very little. He looked as though he could chop wood with his bare hands, but his manicured fingers suggested the idea would appal him.

It has always amazed me that older men would be comfortable with the visuals when people see them out with women this young. Do they not see how people laugh, and make their friends guess whether they’re with their daughter or their mistress?

I feel quite often that it’s good not to know what goes on in the male mind. If we did, I suspect we would spend a lot of our lives in fearful despair.

adept at greeting people as though they were old friends, an accomplished blagger who never knew your name but made you feel welcome and warm for the fifteen seconds he’d spend on you before moving onto the next person.

I learnt that the more knots you tie in a rope, the more you weaken it. So you need one strong knot. God help me, I found this fascinating.

Luckily I have a good head for hats. You either do or you don’t, if you look bad in one hat you will look bad in them all. Too many women think that they look cute in pom-pom hats. They do not. Nobody wearing a pom-pom hat conveys anything other than a desperate wish to look cute in pom-pom hats.

So many people imagine themselves to be liberal, open-minded, progressive. The type who might even argue across a dinner table about the merits of not punishing prisoners but instead educating them out of crime, who vaguely mentions the Nordic model without knowing what that means. But inside, in the part of their mind that they won’t admit to, they still think that those of us who end up behind bars are scum, even if that word makes them shudder when said out loud. They do.

Never yearn for the light that some men will shine on you for the briefest of moments. Snuff it out instead.

There is nothing that screams ‘I have news’ quite like ringing someone’s doorbell without texting first.

Never trust an artificial redhead – their need to be different and interesting marks them out as neither)

the beauty is still obvious, but men think it’s more refined, as if beauty in women is only pure when they pretend not to care about possessing it.

I’ve always wondered why people get so defensive about criticism of their partners. If your mother, a person who has known you since you were a screeching potato in a onesie, thinks that the person you’re with is a bit off, why the fuck would you discount that? Tell me if the person I’ve fallen in love with seems like a monster. List the ways. Do a deep dive into it, make graphs. I want all the information. But nobody else ever seems to.

modern life is 75 per cent cancelling plans and both parties feeling relieved

He loves me fiercely. I’m a part of him.

I held the line – never giving him a suggestion of something more, or encouraging him to explore the possibility. No lingering looks, no drunken hugs that feel just a little too intense. I’ve played it well and kept my friend. I knew that any potential exploration of deeper feelings would break us in ways that we couldn’t fix. And why would I fuck it up for some idiotic attempt at a relationship in our teenage years, when nothing meant anything?

people who propose on big meaningful dates lack imagination. I cannot envisage a worse day to get down on one knee than a family Christmas where your dad started on the mimosas by 11 a.m.

Rich people owned these flats. Rich people who have several homes around the world which they call ‘bases’. None of them homes which have overflowing junk drawers or old bicycles clogging up hallways.

I’ve never been someone who enjoys parties. The amount of small talk involved depletes my energy and makes my whole body tense up. Not because I’m shy, but because it’s so boring it makes me want to die. Life is so short, and we spend so much of it talking to terrible people about the minutiae of their nothing lives. I cannot do it with any enthusiasm.

You cannot shame her, upset her, embarrass her. It would be fascinating, if she weren’t such an empty vessel.

A fake smile takes work – it doesn’t quite reach your eyes, and your facial muscles seem to sense that they’re only going through the motions so it feels like you’re dragging them along. And yet it can’t look sarcastic, as half-hearted smiles so often do.

Me, I had thoughts all the time that I dismissed, knowing them to be warped, self-defeating, treacherous. Intrusive thoughts which feel like your own, but they aren’t, not really.

an entitled mess marrying my best friend just because she wanted someone to love her who wasn’t her father. Christ, what is wrong with women that they demand so little? ‘Not your father’ seemed like a low fucking bar.

Oscar Wilde (him again) once said, ‘All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does, and that is his.’ There’s too much that’s wrong with this to unpack but just to say, he’d have been better off looking at the men who end up like their fathers. You’d come closer to fixing the problems of society if you focused your search there.

I’d forgotten how easy it was to manipulate teenage boys, but it came back to me pretty fast.

I hate fluffy dogs. They’re always so fucking yappy and up themselves. I assume they’re that way because their owners make them so. You never see a nice calm person with a Bichon Frise. It’s always permanently discontented middle-aged women who communicate their disappointments through the dog. ‘Betty can’t sit here, it’s too hot and she’s getting anxious.’ Betty is fine. You, on the other hand, might want to contact a therapist.

Is there anything more tragic than thinking a permanently laid table is the height of sophistication? As though a minor royal might pop in at any moment and be disappointed in the lack of dinner plates.

Really nobody should play house music full stop.

She’s bored, I think. Not the boredom of a rare free day when you feel like you’re wasting time. This is years of built-up ennui, a life filled with lunches and organising staff and too much time spent on physical maintenance.

She filled her hours with activities, but none of them really amounted to anything. It was just a carousel of banality.

Some people love to linger in baths, calling it self-care and pretending it’s got nothing to do with wanting to escape your family for a precious hour or so.

A sudden flurry of bible passages every time he messaged me something flirtatious really slowed down the frequency of his contact. Nothing like a bit of smiting to get rid of a horny teenager’s spontaneous erection.

That’s how teenage relationships should be. They burn short, but boy do they burn bright.

Unable to colonise another planet quite yet, the ultra-rich might be forced to inhabit the same vicinity as everyone else, but they are never quite within our grasp.

Normally the wealthiest people, I have learnt, don’t want to be on any annual rich lists. They don’t want to live in a spotlight where normal people know what they have and where they go.

‘money talks, wealth whispers’

Waters didn’t run deep with that one. As far as I can tell, she wasn’t exactly stupid, she just never had to be smart. She lived a very nice life with everything she ever wanted and as a result, she wasn’t very nice.

While the internet is a place to get closer to your heroes, it’s also a place to obsessively hate-watch people you would try your best to avoid in real life.

Rich people see tax the way some people see climate change – it’s a social justice issue worth taking to the streets for.

Animal lovers are always mad to talk about ailments,

I wasn’t normally someone to leave on the dot of 5.30 p.m., people who do that are usually the dullest and most aggravating colleagues – the kind that go on and on in inconsequential meetings and insist on a proper system for the communal fridge but refuse to engage in meaningful work. They are also the least fireable employees, since they have normally read their contract requirements thoroughly and know exactly what they can get away with. And not that it matters, but this particular kind of colleague is never the attractive charismatic one. They’re not leaving in order to go and get changed for an exciting party.

He’s a terrible monster but he’s only rinsing the willing.

Fifteen minutes seems oddly quaint when you see these empty-headed kids desperately trying to make a video go viral every single day.

She didn’t dive down to those emotional levels, everything was boredom, mockery or desire for her. Base level stuff.

RIP was floated around a lot, an expression I’ve always hated. Rest in peace. No matter how lively or funny or desperate to live you were. Just rest now. A generic, pointless comment.