Here’s a confession. I lied at the weekend. Not just a small lie, several large ones actually, and to an entire table of people. I’d like to say it was because we were at a wedding, it had been a long day and we were all a little drunk and the people were slightly obnoxious strangers. But the truth is, well, all of those excuses. But mostly I lied because I had the opportunity to. Simple as that.
You see, I’m in Australia at the moment for my cousin’s wedding, and rather than finding ourselves seated with my close family for dinner, my 40-year old brother and I were, for some strange reason, seated at the ‘kids’ table. (Mind you, it appeared the only pre-requisite for being a ‘kid’ was you didn’t have grey hair).
Anyway, they were a little boring which meant after we had exhausted talking about a) the weather, b) the meal and c) how long they thought the free booze would last, conversation turned to them grilling me about my so called glamorous life in the media.
In my defence, I was pretty truthful to start with. When someone asked who the most famous person I’d ever met was, I said it depended on your definition of famous, but I had recently toured the Churchill Hospital with the Prime Minister Gordon Brown. This was greeted with a polite ‘oh right, but what about someone really famous’?
Sensing a challenging crowd, I told the story of how Ricky Gervais once called to apologise for having me spend 20 minutes running from store to store to find him a ripe banana. A strange story, but 100 per cent true.
Mind you this only brought mild amusement to the crowd. A chat with Nelly Furtado only received a slight eyebrow raise, Kylie Minogue, Tina Tuner, Billy Joel, The Sugababes and that guy who played The Minister for Magic in Harry Potter, all were greeted with ‘okay, but anyone else famous’?
At this point something in my head clicked, so I dipped out to the ladies room to splash myself with a heavy dose of embellishment, and when I returned, my quick hello to Beyonce as I passed the phone across to someone more important suddenly became an interview that just stopped short of us exchanging phone numbers because we got on so well; a chat with the supporting actors for a Colin Farrell movie became a long discussion with the lead man himself in a hotel room no less; and I stole my friend Shane’s story of the day he was so nervous interviewing Jerry Seinfeld that Jerry stopped the interview, took the microphone and started asking himself questions to take the pressure off.
Needless to say the young almost unimpressionable crowd were finally impressed.
The only saving grace is there is no chance of ever seeing these people again.
We live over 10,000 miles apart, and the likelihood of any of them ever finding out it was all a lie is nearly impossible.
That is, unless, of course they Google my name and find this article...
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