Veg out: your guide to staying in this Christmas

Londoners don’t know how to stay in — and why should we? In a city where every evening brings another immersive drag theatre performance, pop-up mezcal-and-pasty golf game or inflatable secret sushi restaurant, there’s simply far too much fun to be wrung out of our city. But then… Christmas. At best, a day of enforced sofa slumping; chances are, you’re looking at three days or more of Terry’s Chocolate Orange-fuelled lock-in, the sugar simultaneously sending you hyper yet comatose. Fear not. It turns out that there are plenty of things to do that don’t involve leaving the house for whole hours at a time. Who knew?

THE GAME

If You Had To… (£16.99, firebox.com)

Your Cards Against Humanity are dog-eared, wine-stained and vodka-wrinkled, with several missing and the others forever committed to your sick, twisted memory. This festive season, you need a new horrible game. Shuffle forward If You Had To…, a card game that is basically a slightly elevated version of ‘would you rather?’. There are 250 cards printed with deeply distasteful-slash-deeply stupid scenarios (for example, from the printable options, would you rather… ‘Have live webcams on you 24 /7’ or ‘have all your meals fed to you like you’re a baby bird’?). One person is the judge; the cards are dealt to the other players, who have to play whichever card they think the judge would least like to do, then convince the judge why their card is the worst. A great way to practise your debating skills while knocking back sloe gin and secretly judging the judge forever more. See also: Dead Sleb (£14.99) a version of Top Trumps incorporating all your favourite former famous people, ranked by popularity, age, tragic factor and exit method.

THE PODCASTS

Your brain has become sludge, a mindless mix of Frozen, bad cracker jokes and enough mulled wine to kill a horse. That’s fine, it’s Christmas. But at some point, it might be nice to gently reintroduce some mental activity — just a little — to prevent you regressing completely by the new year.

Stance

Since its inception in January, Stance has become one of the smartest podcasts to boast about listening to: Heta Fell and Chrystal Genesis’s identity, culture and politics show takes on topics from Basquiat to Silicon Valley, with guests such as Riz Ahmed joining the discussion.

Pod Save America

Fancy a no-nonsense conversation about politics in America? Try Jon Favreau, Daniel Pfeiffer, Jon Lovett and Tommy Vietor’s progressive political show, launched in furious response to Trump’s presidency and with past guests including actual Barack himself.

How I Built This

Want to revolutionise the world, or at least know how the likes of Bumble’s Whitney Wolfe, Airbnb’s Joe Gebbia or Ben and Jerry of, er, Ben & Jerry’s made their respective fortunes? Tune in and get inspired.

Ctrl Alt Delete

How do you deal with a life led online? Author Emma Gannon knows how, and her interviews with different guests every week — from Lily Cole to Jess Phillips via Lauren Laverne and Lena Dunham — might just help you find some headspace in this wired world, too.

THE BOOKS

The Best of AA Gill (W&N, £20)

Few writers could compete with the late, great AA Gill. Lap up his wonderful wit, merciless excoriations and lyrical musings in this collection of his very best journalism, covering everything from eating turtle to Iraq, dyslexia and Good Morning Britain.

The Secret Life of Cows by Rosamund Young (Faber & Faber, £9.99)

There’s a good chance you’ve found this quirky little thing in your stocking, but it’s more than a jokey gift. Young’s sweet, if weird, bovine book about how cows think is engrossing and will ensure you never look at a field of cattle the same way again.

The Sparsholt Affair by Alan Hollinghurst (Picador, £20)

A Hollinghurst is inevitably impossible to put down, and his latest is no exception. A hugely engrossing portrait of gay life through the 20th century, from Oxford during the Blitz to Eighties liberalism, it’s a perfect excuse to hunker down in your childhood bedroom until the new year.

Modern Gods by Nick Laird (Fourth Estate, £12.99)

Laird might be best-known for his poetry, but that’s changed with his third novel. Modern Gods contrasts the lives of two sisters, Liz and Alison Donnelly, jumps between Northern Ireland and Papa New Guinea, and is brilliant.

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders (Bloomsbury, £18.99)

There’s no time like post-present opening to get stuck into this year’s Man Booker Prize-winner. Saunders’ experimental novel reimagines President Abraham Lincoln’s grief after the death of his third son, Willie, in astonishingly beautiful, Dante-esque style.

The Standing Chandelier by Lionel Shriver (Harper Collins, £9.99)

Shriver can do no wrong and her latest short, sharp novel, about whether a man can ever be ‘just friends’ with his ex, is a perfect antidote to saccharine Christmas cheer. And at 128 pages, you can read the whole book while small relatives are engrossed in The Emoji Movie.

THE FILMS

Nan hogging the telly for the Queen’s speech? Cousins drawing blood over Christmas University Challenge? Disappear for a streaming sesh. This is the perfect time of year to tick off those Oscar winners you’ve pretended to have seen all year, get your indie fix and documentary hit and, obviously, snort into your eggnog over Ron Burgundy.