Pardon my lame excuses

> Trying to get out of a bad date or party take some finese or you might be caught out and left red-faced

IHAVE never been good at making excuses. Take this example of the excuse I gave for missing an author’s book launch: “Yeah, I know, sorry, I died, wasn’t resuscitated until afterwards.”

So I was interested when a reader named Gayatri stated that sensible people review their calendars regularly, and prepare escape plans.

Her top tip for slipping away: “Do not pretend to get a phone call – it’s much harder to carry off than you think.”

She added that there is no point trying to escape from an unwanted date by pretending you are ‘just going to the toilet’.

“Your date may watch the toilet door, and restrooms rarely have windows big enough to climb out of.”

Instead, she said, text a pre-arranged keyword to a friend who will ring you with a fake emergency such as: “Come home quick, your brother cut his head off, and you have to hold it while surgeons sew it back on.”

There are even apps (such as Bad Date Rescue) that you can discreetly click to receive a pre-recorded “you are needed” message.

An alternative escape strategy is to say something that makes your date nervous enough to want to end the evening.

Some of these statements come to mind: “The voices in my head told me you are the Chosen One”; “My 30 cats are going to love you”; “So, what shall we call our kids?”; or “I’m not contagious any more, hopefully”.

Readers also sent me recent news items involving people making ill-planned attempts at disappearing.

The first was about a suspected car thief on the run from police in Saskatchewan, Canada, on Sept 27. He tried to escape by climbing a tall tree.

Trees are never good escape routes, as the likelihood of finding alternative exit routes up there are pretty low.

He stayed there for several hours, news services reported, but came down when someone offered him a taco (a foodstuff North Americans find totally irresistible).

The second report was from China Daily in the first week of October. A man tried to escape paying his hotel bill by slipping out of his guestroom window.

The hotel was a skyscraper, so he ended up dangling from telephone wires over the centre of the road, 19 storeys up in the air, bringing that part of the Chinese city of Guizhou to a standstill.

Thanks to the wonders of the internet, it is possible that a significant part of the world’s population watched his ‘discreet’ escape.

These are worthy additions to this columnist’s ‘most ill-considered escapes’ file, although they don’t replace the current top story, which is a 1990s report about a thief in Japan who tried to escape from pursuers by sprinting into the main hall of a police training school.

“Nice of him to give the trainees some hands-on practice,” the chief instructor said.

Gayatri also had a failed escape story of her own. “I abandoned a nerdy group of friends to go to a party which turned out to be even duller. Worst of all, the first group ended up launching a really cool start-up.”

Then she had to go. Her phone rang. Or was it an app?