Doing nothing is hindering my ability to come up with great excuses
Ionly realised it was a problem this week when I sat down to reply to an email someone had sent me five days earlier. “I’m sorry this is so late,” I started typing, deploying the traditional greeting that many of us have used not just since the advent of email, but since we started to write thank-you letters aged five or six. Then I paused, hands frozen above my keyboard. What was my excuse?
I’m facing the same problem with Zoom invitations. “Oh, not another one!” I thought this week when a friend suggested we attempt a group chat. “Not another 40 minutes of pretending to have a conversation, while secretly despairing at all my chins. Other people manage to look perfectly normal on Zoom, whereas I look like Mrs Potato Head. I’ll have to make up an excuse.” But again, what excuse? They’re in short supply these days when our social calendars look more lacklustre than Old Mother Hubbard’s cupboard. Dodgy internet connection? Screaming children? You can give them a whirl, but tonight marks the 42nd night we’ve all spent in since lockdown began and I’m running out of credible alibis.
In the old days, I was a big fan of an excuse. “I’m sorry this is so late, mad few days!” I’d write in my tardy emails, trying to make it sound as if I was running a FTSE 100 company, dashing from meeting to meeting, and only now sitting behind my laptop to catch my breath. If I wanted to dodge a physical invitation, I had a stock get-out clause. “I’m so sorry, I can’t make dinner with your new boyfriend that night because I’ve got a work thing,” I’d say, sometimes with a sad voice to try and denote genuine sorrow. “A work thing” was a brilliantly vague phrase, with which nobody dared quibble. Harder to deploy on the weekends if you were invited, say, to a godchild’s fifth birthday or a dinner party, but in such situations, you simply had to become more creative. “Sorry, can’t come because I think I’ve got nits,” often worked a treat.
But now? The only place I’ve been rushing to in the past few weeks is the fridge and “Sorry, I’ve been lying in bed watching Netflix” doesn’t cut it either. I wish I could be more like the seven-year-old niece who doesn’t give a fig about the plausibility of her excuses. “Finish your green beans,” I tell her over dinner almost every evening, at which point she will get up and sidle out of the kitchen declaring that she needs the loo. At the weekend, as she skipped towards the damp garden in her socks, I waved a pair of trainers in the air, but she refused them. Apparently those specific trainers “are mean” to her.
Alas, social niceties mean we can’t get away with such nonsense when we’re adults and in an extreme case of overthinking, even for me, I’ve started worrying about the explosion of parties and socialising once this is all over when excuses will surely be frowned upon, for what feeble pretext can possibly be used without being considered an awful stick-inthe-mud? Almost exactly 75 years ago, people celebrated the end of the war by partying and going at it in the streets. Will it be like that? The idea makes me feel quite anxious. I expect I’ll have nits that week.