This week the ongoing ambient overload of El Clásico reached a high point. The current quartet of Real Madrid v Barcelona matches is three-quarters of the way done and we are now entering a state of near-total sensory over-gorge. The spectacle of well-groomed men playing football quite slowly seems to be not just the most important thing but the only important thing. With this in mind, and with a long bank holiday weekend to fill, I have reproduced below 10 essential El Clásico pointers. The intention is to offer solace in these darker moments of inter‑Clásico withdrawal; and maybe even to help you stage your own cold‑turkey home-made version of El Clásico, perhaps using a shoe box, some marbles and an Action Man with a greying bouffant Elvis wig.

1 An important detail from the start. The two managers' heads must keep appearing in great, looming opposition: the doe-eyed baldie against the silver‑fox cad, suggestive of some kind of epic chess fight between these smouldering classical deities. This happens so often – tiny players: big heads – that the switch back to normal life can be difficult. "Where is that vast looming dictator head?" you may find yourself wondering every 15 seconds. It may be best simply to hold a picture of a big, staring male head in one hand and intermittently thrust this in front of your face until the craving dies.

2 An English commentator must say something jarringly inappropriate, like: "Yeah, he gives Madrid an out-ball" – as though Real Madrid's players really have been sitting around all week discussing out-balls and working the channels and bullying the centre-halves. This is the punditry equivalent of explaining loudly and patiently that you want el ketchup in a small Andalucían restaurant.

3 People in the crowd will appear to be having detailed, shrugging analytical conversations with one another, like spectators in Roy of the Rovers saying things like: "The youngster's had a crack from fully 40 yards – it looks like a real tester for the veteran custodian." This simply doesn't happen in England. There just isn't the opportunity, what with all the shouting and pointing.

4 A player will do something so ripe with "game intelligence" that it will take your breath away. On Wednesday Carles Puyol, nudged out of play at high speed by Angel Di María, remembered to uproot the corner flag as he careered past, having calculated in a micro‑second that the already‑in‑place Di María would be prevented from taking a quick throw with the pitch thus dismembered. Aye. It were proper champion.

5 Football will at times seem like a horribly claustrophobic thing: supremely talented athletes trapped in a fly-paper of mutually annihilating excellence, where the only way to wrench a limb loose is to bend the rules with a howl, a dive, a sneaky glance, a stretcher ride and then a sudden sprint back on to Hoover up the extra oxygen. The whole experience will feel a bit like taking a sweat-stained midsummer National Express coach journey with an entire battalion of elite concert violinists who somehow manage to perform an hour and a half of Schoenberg even while they're banging each other in the ear with their bowing arm.

6 Lionel Messi will do something completely different. What is it with Messi? He still looks like a man who has wandered into all this corporate footballing homogeneity from a supercharged version of the 1970s. Looking at his standard-issue scurrying gait, his shrugging, mousey demeanour, and then witnessing the preternatural skittering electricity in those feet, you wonder why there hasn't ever been one of these before, or even hundreds of them. This is not an otherworldly, unimaginable state of genius. He is just normal – but normal times a million.

7 A really crap fight-style activity will break out, chiefly involving people looking offended or standing near one another gesturing and then, for some reason, embracing.

8 Every now and then Xavi's noble, hollow-eyed pouchy little face will appear looking completely out of place in all this sleek hyper-modernity, as if a beret-clad left-bank poet of the 1950s accidentally wandered into Spearmint Rhino after losing his spectacles.

9 Remember: it is all incredibly serious. English football still conforms to a narrative arc that resembles above all a Carry On film: slapstick antics, parpingly simplistic pay-offs. But El Clásico is something else. Imagine the most serious thing possible. The life of Nelson Mandela as reinterpreted through Soviet-era mime-theatre by an unusually depressed David Dimbleby. El Clásico is far more serious than this. It is a seriousness that can only scarcely be comprehended. It surrounds you. It isn't smiling. No. Don't try to smile at the seriousness.

10 Mainly, it is all about disgust. José Mourinho says he is "disgusted to live in this world". I believe him. He really does live in a disgusting world. Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face – but then so is endless, fluent, highly convincing bullshit. Mourinho's entire existence is spent creating a vibe. Like a cardinal in a ritualistic high church sect he spends his time shaking his robes, incanting rhetoric and disseminating his pungent incense. This toxic vibe has now permeated Mourinho's skin. Its odours have engulfed completely the current concatenations of clásicos. We have one more instalment of this fevered disgust to come. I really can't wait.