The leaves are gone, the barbecue plate is rusting and the only thing I’m not lamenting the lack of is mosquitos.
It is cold and dark and June and what this part of the world needs right now is a better excuse for running late.
The dog ate my second layer of merino. The overnight oats didn’t realise it was morning. I was de-icing my HOP card. It was too dark to safely apply mascara. Honestly, I thought it was still Sunday.
Summer is a hum and a hive. Winter is one unseasonal cicada dying slowly in the hallway.
In June, nobody does anything on schedule. Everybody is running late. Everybody needs an excuse.
I put a fingernail through my tights. My will to live refused to get out of bed. The bus is a plague ship – why would you make me board a plague ship?
(The last time I wrote about taking public transport I received an email accusing me of performative virtue signalling. Dear Paul-If-That-Is-Even-Your-Real-Name: If I could avoid sitting in a soup of other people’s condensing breath, squashed against a seat hog in a puffer jacket that smells like 2024, I absolutely would).
Experts say the best excuse is an honest one.
Witness the former staffer who messaged her boss late one night to say that she’d had a fight with her boyfriend and wouldn’t be in tomorrow because she “wasn’t feeling it”.
Bravo, but also, lazy.
What if, instead, your cat crawled into a wall cavity and got itself stuck, mewling late-late-late into the night and you couldn’t leave until emergency services arrived to dismantle your house? (True story. Honestly. It’s a scientific fact that cats can’t reverse).
When it comes to making your excuses, you could tell the truth. But, I wonder, does that fulfil your creative potential as a human? What if nobody believes that you simply can’t be arsed?
A colleague relays the definitely true time a woman fainted on her bus to work, necessitating a lengthy delay while medical assistance was administered.
“My boss didn’t believe me. He said ‘no, that did not happen’. A few years later, it happened again, and my new boss was really sympathetic.” (The moral of this story is stick to your story. Eventually, you will get away with being late for work, although your membership to the Northern Club may not be guaranteed).
Experts say a good excuse should be clear and, above all, brief.
Don’t overshare. Don’t overcomplicate.
Once, a Ukrainian footballer blamed noisy amphibians for his team’s loss to Spain. This sounds far-fetched unless you have tried to go to sleep in Western Australia during motorbike frog breeding season.
Once, a British Prime Minister said he thought he had been given cocaine but he sneezed so it did not go up his nose and “in fact, I may have been doing icing sugar”. This sounds far-fetched unless you have met Boris Johnson.
Honesty is the best policy. But it can be so dull.
Kim Knight joined the New Zealand Herald in 2016 and is a senior journalist on its lifestyle desk.
