If you must make an excuse, keep it entertaining and add a few aliens

The most inglorious episode of my adult life (so far) has been the period where I managed not to file a tax return for five years. Which is how I found myself on the phone to a softly spoken tax official, discussing the horrors of terminal procrastination. I explained that while I’d love to tell her I’d been lost in the Amazonian rainforest, or seconded by MI6 for a secret mission in Tashkent, it was only my inability to not do today what I could put off until I died that was preventing payment. I even had the money in my savings account.

The truth was, it wasn’t just horrid things like tax I ignored. I had, for instance, bought a vintage rocking horse on ebay. Four years later it was still sitting in the owner’s garage, while he mailed me, begging for collection.

The tax official listened with the calm, intense sympathy of a top-level shrink – think Susie Orbach at her most forensic – and at the end of my 20 minute monologue said: “Why don’t you visit a GP and get a statement that you were suffering from a severe form of mental illness?” When I started laughing she said, “Believe you me, I’ve heard far worse excuses than yours.”

I now know that statement is spot-on. Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs has just released a list of the weirdest excuses offered to it last year for not filing a tax return. These include “my wife was seeing aliens and wouldn’t let me enter the house”, and an ex-wife who left the tax return upstairs, “but I suffer from vertigo and couldn’t go upstairs to retrieve it”.

HMRC has reminded us all that there are few things more entertaining than the “dog ate my homework” excuse at its most bizarre. Incredibly, these frantic selfjustifications often have the added virtue of being true.

A fellow student once convinced a tutor that she couldn’t file an essay on “the use of irony in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park” because she suffered from synesthesia (a condition where the stimulation of one sense leads to the triggering of another), and the word irony was so steely grey she’d sunk into instant depression.

Another friend’s brother told me he’d joined the French Foreign Legion (yes, he truly did) to avoid a school reunion, although apparently the real reason was he’d done a runner with the family silver. And I also know a man who didn’t make it to a good friend’s stag party because he dropped a pan of simmering marmalade on his foot in what was thereafter known as the Paddington defence.

I once tried to explain to the landlord of the Eagle and Child pub in Oxford that the reason I was late for work was that I’d driven to a party in Wiltshire where some joy riders had stolen my unlocked brown Austin Allegro, then driven it over a cricket pitch into the middle of an allotment where they hemmed it in with beanpoles.

However the high priestess of the jawdropping excuse is, without doubt, my little sister. She once told me she couldn’t make a rendezvous because an Arab princess was holed up in her flat awaiting gender reassignment.

You may wonder why the work-shy and chaotic bother putting out such elaborate justifications. The answer is obvious: the practised excuse-maker comes to understand that the weary boss, teacher or tax inspector has heard so many lame justifications over the years that the least you can do is make your explanation diverting. In fact, it’s practically your patriotic duty as citizen of a nation of storytellers.