There’s nothing funnier than the truth

He smiled benignly, the way he always does when he calls. Paul’s expression is fixed in aspic – whether his day has been good, bad or indifferent, he always looks as though he’s permanently celebrating his football team’s FA Cup victory, his son’s success in GCSE exams or his wife’s announcement that she’s bought him a King BBQ Grill as a surprise present. In phoneworld, Paul is permanently cheery.

Twenty minutes later, I called him back and made my excuses for not answering earlier.

“Didn’t you see my call?”

“Yes, sorry I missed you. I was talking to Jimmy Tarbuck.”

Paul laughed. “Yeah right. And I’m Meryl Streep.”

“No you’re not. You’re Paul.”

I’m no good at excuses. While most people seem to have a roll call of dubious reasons for not doing stuff – meeting a woman they don’t really fancy, forgetting to warm-up dinner, being late for work – I’m useless. If somebody asks me a question, I answer it honestly. And let me tell you, the truth can be a scary place.

But it’s also funnier than dissembling.

Doubt gnawed at Paul: “Was it really Jimmy Tarbuck?”

“Yeah, we were talking about Billy Wright, Bruce Forsyth and his daughter’s radio show.”

“Really?”

“Yes. Old Tatty Head. Boom boom.”

Talking to Tarby isn’t my favourite truth-excuse. That goes to the time I was supposed to be seeing friends in Manchester, at a Comedy Store gig. We’d made arrangements, locked down dates and agreed a meet-up. Then we did the ‘I’ll just double check my diary’ thing.

“Oh, sorry, I can’t make it. I’m eating caviar in Finland that weekend.”

My mates huffed and puffed. There were swear words.

Remarkably, it was true. It was the acme of excuses, the height of truth, the ultimate in honesty. A work-thing meant I had to fly to a fish farm in Finland to see how caviar is extracted from sturgeon. It’s fascinating, though probably not for the sturgeon. Poor things. They swim around in massive indoor pools for years and years then, just when they thing they’ve sussed out life, out they’re popped to be relieved of the black gold within.

My excuses don’t come close to the best there have ever been.

An 11-year-old told his mum he couldn’t do jobs around the house, repeating an excuse heard from an older sibling. “I started my period and I’m cramping real bad.” Only trouble was, the 11-year-old was a boy who’d no idea what that meant.

Another schoolkid ripped up every valid excuse note his mother ever wrote, replacing it with his own forged note. That was the handwriting was always consistent and there were never any questions.

Another bunked off school on non-uniform, superhero day, while other kids were coming to classes dressed as Batman, Spider-Man, Superman and Wonder Woman. When the truant reappeared the following day, he was collared by a teacher who demanded an excuse for not being at school. “I was here, I came as the Invisible Man.” The teacher dropped it; she either believed in his ability to become invisible or thought his stupidity was just too much to even question.

Zambian tennis player Lighton Ndefwayl once explained his loss to fellow countryman Musumba Bwayla by insisting: “He beat me because my jockstrap was too tight.”

In the post-digital age, excuses are rife. They have their own hashtag on Twitter – and while most of them relate to USA President Donald Trump, one of the best is this: “When I snort cocaine my hayfever goes away.”

The two best, however, are these: The grandchild of scientist Tomas Lindahl took an apologetic note to school for failing to hand in her homework. It read: “Please give Maddie one more day. We had some big news. Her grandpa won the Nobel Prize.” And, yes, he did.

Michael Fenerty, 10, also sent in an excuse note for missing school. He’d gone to meet Bruce Springsteen at a book signing in Philadelphia – and got his hero. He was let off because, let’s face it, no one argues with The Boss.

My blanket tell-the-truth policy doesn’t always work. In a rare-but-administratively-damning incident, I agreed to go to dinner with four people on one night. That’s four different people in four different locations. Disorganised doesn’t come close.

Names were stacked on my calendar like pieces of Lego in a wall. One potato, two potato, three potato, four. I felt a bit like a disreputable American airline, overbooking people to make sure there was a contingency, just in case some of them dropped out. Happily, two did, which meant I only had to make excuses – ‘sorry, I’m stupid, I’ve overbooked with three other people’ – to one of them.

Excuses are optional. The truth is much funnier.