All of us have at some point told a lie. Lies vary in degrees of awfulness from the truly despicable ( cheating on your partner or the Donald Trump variety), the inevitable ( saying you really like someone’s new boyfriend when in fact you think he is awful), and the pointless ( like lying about your age on a dating website ). And then there is the fib which always sounds like a word fromThe Beano, and pretends to be as harmless as toast and jam by the fire.
The first lie I remember telling concerned a jar of biscuits at my friend Helens house. If Helen Haines you are reading this, I am finally, 50 years later coming clean. It was me who ate that custard cream. And shamefully I lied to your mum and said it was you. If it makes you feel any better, for days afterwards I imagined that the police would soon be knocking on my door and hauling me off to prison. A lesson in how awful it is to have a guilty conscience.There was another incident around that time and one that I am not proud of. It involved the bin lorry and my brothers brand new bike. I did not have a brand new bike. I had a really shit bike with solid wheels and wonky brakes. It was pure coincidence that this new bike was left in the road exactly at the time as the bin lorry which then reversed over it.
We used to have a friend, a wonderful friend, who despite her loveliness was simply unable to tell the truth, and to give her credit would argue until the cows came home about the authenticity of each ridiculous untruth that came to her so easily. An example was a bowl she gave me, a very nice bowl but she presented it with a flourish and said that she had made it with her own fair hands. When I pointed out that it actually had a stamp on the bottom saying ” Made in China” she told me that she had manufactured her own personal stamp and had indeed printed it on the bowl herself.
We are all guilty of the usual ” I’m just around the corner” when in fact we have only just got out of bed because we completely forgot, or that “sitting in traffic” means that we actually left so late there is no hope in hell of arriving anytime soon. These lies are pretty harmless as are ” I’ve left my wallet behind” though this one is just plain irritating.
A fine example of the common fib are the genius untruths uttered by small children. I came into the sitting room one day to find Molly who was about four sitting on the floor with what can only be described as a comedy haircut. At her feet was a pile of blonde hair. On the sofa armed with a pair of nail scissors looking very pleased with himself was Lucas. I asked him what on earth he had been doing. “It wasn’t me” he said. “It was the scissors”.
The most embarrassing lie I ever told involved Lucas’s absence from school. Well it was embarrassing because I got caught out. In a spectacular fashion.
It was Glastonbury weekend and I sent in a note to his teacher saying that he was most unwell and would be absent for a couple of days. In fact he was nothing of the sort and went off frolicking in the mud with the rest of the family. When he finally appeared back at school the following Tuesday his teacher asked him if he was feeling better, and as instructed by me he said he was still feeling a bit rough but ok. At which his teacher said ” Sorry to hear that you were too ill to go to school, but were well enough to go to Glastonbury as all the teachers saw you on the telly dancing onstage with Iggy Pop”. CRINGE. I did then search the internet for footage and sure enough, there he was larger than life, dancing away with his unmistakable big curly hair. “Why on earth did you get onstage with Iggy Pop?” I asked. “Because he asked me” he replied.
Fair enough.
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