I've never been that good at lying - untruths I mean, not stretching out horizontally on a surface (I'm great at that). There aren't many occasions I'm called upon to do it, and then it's usually to protect someone's feelings through phrases like 'Oh, what a beautiful baby' or 'I definitely think you should cut the green wire'.
So I thought I'd come clean with my deceptions to which you can decide whether I should be forgiven or not:
- I've told boring people who have sat next to me trains that my stop was coming, to which I've got up - gone out the door and walked down a few carriages before getting back on.
- Once or twice I've also pretended to be an answerphone when someone has rung me up - that's quite easy, if you can say 'Hi, I'm not around at the moment, leave a message' and come up with a convicing beat-box style beep. You can get away with it quite well if you can not laugh when people start leaving the message.
- When I was 7, a child boasted to me that he had a video player. Thinking on my 1982 feet I told him that our family had one too, but that it only recorded the programme you were watching at the time, and the TV had to be on. He questioned this and I remember just saying that it was a special one from Japan. Yes, a special one, that was techically useless. I might as well have said it ran on sticklebricks and had a remote control made out of toblerone.
- I also recall claiming, as a child, that I hadn't been playing with my father's razor and cut myself but that 'I was trying to cut excess string off a balloon' and that it was the only sharp thing handy. I got away with that.
-At University I managed to avoid being beaten up by a Coventry thug who wanted to kick the proverbial out of me by adopting a vaguely convincing accent (based on Richard Beckinsale in Porridge) and claiming that I actually ran the music counter at the local Woolworths, rather than being a sponging student. Somehow I got away with it.
As the years have gone by though, I've realised that my lies are nothing compared to the world-class, olympic level liars out that. My favourite was a chap at school claimed he couldn't go swimming with the rest of the boys as 'whenever I smell chlorine I get a nosebleed'. So whilst we were all diving for rubber bricks and being told to tread water by a fascist swim teacher, he sat behind the glass chomping 10p Wham bars and cola bottles. I remember that several of us got suspicious of his 'chlorine allegry' and when we had a vial of the material in chemistry lessons, ran towards him with it to see if it was true.
The same chap went on to claim that he had written a 32 part tv cartoon series, based on the Aliens from the film Aliens that a US TV network was interested. He also said that people got cancer from Skittles (the sweets, not the UK version of 10 pin bowling). I'm not sure any of it was true, what was though - was that he had bad BO and massive sunken eyes. He couldn't decieve us about that.
Anyway, it's people like that who make me realise that my lies are rubbish and that I'll never be a world class liar.
Unless I just made him up of course...
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