Today I've been contemplating the little lies peope tell. I don't mean whopping big porkie-pies, I just mean the little embelishments we probably all make to the details of our every-day lives slightly more interesting. I know I do it all the time. Par example: when people ask me what I do for a living, I don't say 'I'm an administrator in a nusing home' because its just too sucky and dull. Instead I say 'I'm an accounts assistant for a company based in ........' which is sort of true in a very round-about way, but is very definitely misleading. And even that doesn't sound great.
What started me thinking about this was talking to L over dinner tonight (a regular monday night occurance) about a mutual aquaintance who used to work at the same place as me. Ths woman, it eventually transpired, lied about everything. She told lots of stories about how her blood-pressure was dangerously high, she was on strict medication, the doctor wanted to sign her off work but she would struggle on to help us all out et cetera et cetera. This went on and on, embelished with all sorts of stories about performing first aid on a man she found collapsed in the street, winning £500 on scratchcards, being flagged down while driving by a woman who's small child was having a seizure blah blah blah. Finally she came up with some story about chasing down a mugger who'd stolen some old dear's handbag: this is the woman who for years has been going on about how she's about to drop from a stroke and apparently can't even climb the stairs at home because she's so ill. And we're supposed to swallow that this 58-year-old walking heart-attack had chased down and rugby-tackled some drug-soaked chav and held him down 'til the police arrived. No-one believed her, everyone had lost all respect for her, and she resigned not long after.
So I wonder what had made her tell all these blatant lies. She didn't make any financial gain from them, she didn't advance her career (what there was of it, she was a cleaner) and she didn't make any friends from it as we all actually reallly liked her when she wasn't spinning some monsterous yarn. The conclusion I drew was that she was so desperately disappointed in her own life, married to a man she obviously had no kind of relationship with, living and working in the same village she grew up in, no money, no chance of ever going anywhere, and probably felt like all her chances had passed her by. The lies probably just covered up her own embarrassment in her own life. And this is not a judgement on her; no-one's life is a failure and I never thought of her as anything other than a lovely person who for some unexplained reason had a tendancy to tell untruths.
Turns out (thanks to some insider knowledge from L) she had fallen in love with the son of a local farming family when she was a teenager, and he in return with her, but in some Romeo-and-Juliette style nonsense his family were a bit country-set fox-hunting hooray-henrys and didn't want him marrying the farm-hand's daughter. So their budding romance was thwarted and he married a more socially acceptable horsey type and she in turn married soon after. They then spent years indulging in some late-night fumbles in the back of his landrover, and apparently still see each other 'on the down-low' to this day.
Maybe its actually the greatest romance never told. I feel bad for her. She must spend a lot of time wondering 'what-if?'
FYI: still smoking, still drinking, done f-all jogging. Perhaps I am headed down the same path?