(Obviously, if you’ve read my blogs before then you will know that I’m very much against this concept, as making people identify with one side or the other causes unnecessary conflict but you all love a binary choice so for the purposes of this blog I’m going to pretend that what I am about to say isn’t a behaviour on a spectrum but a clear either or)
You are either someone who takes the blame or apportions it.
You’ll know which type of person you are by the first thought that comes into your head when something goes wrong. If you think, ‘Who let that happen?’ then you are a blameshifter. However, if the first thing you think is, ‘Oh no, what did I do?’ then you are a buckstopper.
My whole family are buckstoppers. We tend to take blame for things that can’t possibly be our fault. Even my sister, who when she was little you could have been fooled into thinking was a blameshifter.
We could be playing in another room and we might have had a tiff, or broken something, or maybe nothing at all had happened and when one of our parents walked in she would immediately confess without realising she had confessed.
“It wasn’t me,” she would say.
She was only saying that it wasn’t her because her first thought was that she had done something wrong.
I preferred the option of keeping quiet and hoping that no one noticed everything I’d done wrong, so she sometimes got the blame for things I’d done. If anyone had asked, though, I would have said, “Yes, it was me. It was all my fault!”
So, as a buckstopper, I would like to apologise. It is my fault.
The Long Suffering Husband and I were walking the dog in silence on Monday. We had run out of things to say to each other. I assumed I’d done something wrong to make him stop talking to me.
“What is it?” I said, “What have I done? It must be something really awful for you to stop talking to me. I did leave the tap dripping in the downstairs bathroom again but as you know it’s really stiff and that’s normally something you like to talk about.”
The LSH looked confused.
“There’s just nothing to talk about, is there. Nothing happens. Even the weather.”
“The weather?”
“Yes,” he said, “You know, like when you’re on holiday and you’ve got to the ten day point. You’re ready to go home but you’ve got another four days. Every day is the same. Even the sky is the same colour blue. You just wish for rain.”
I had to agree with him. The weather had got boring.
“A little bit of rain would be nice.”
I thought about it for the rest of the day. These were the reasons I thought rain would be nice.
1. The garden needed it.
2. The dog was getting too hot to walk far.
3. Rain would make my regular walks people free again.
4. It would cheer the LSH up and give us something to talk about.
5. It would make people put their Karcher pressure washers away.
6. There might be some other news because I had started to worry that News at Ten was running out of things to report.
So, I’m sorry. It’s my fault. I made it rain. The birds loved it too. Pigeons and doves everywhere sat on fences and bathed their armpits in the drizzle.
Unfortunately, the weather didn’t help News at Ten. They really struggled for content last night. They showed us people dying in hospital, people dying in care homes and people dying in hospices. Then they showed us the minute silence that was held for the care workers who have died from Coronavirus, so far. They showed us the whole minute. Twice. Once from a street and once from the Prime Minister’s office.
“They need more news,” I said to the LSH, “I’ve always wondered what would happen if there really was a ‘No News Day’. What we wouldn’t give for a sink hole or an earthquake now.”
I’m sorry. I thought it. I’ve tried to take it back. I’ve thought that I’d much prefer Huw Edwards to appear on the screen and say,
“Apart from the deaths that you all know about because you are tuning into the Daily Briefing at five , with your glass of wine and cubes of cheese, there has been no news. Instead we thought we’d play you quarter of an hour of birdsong.”
But I think it might be too late.
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