It wasn’t me!

 When we were growing up, my parents would walk into a room and my sister would say, “It wasn’t me!” or “I didn’t do it!” None of us really knew where she got this guilt complex from because she would say it if she had done something, if I’d done something she didn’t want to be blamed for or even if nothing had happened. I can’t say that I was the perfect big sister who never exploited this trait (although I don’t remember doing so) or even that it was my manipulative self deflecting tactics that had caused it. 

However, it became a family joke and whenever anything happened we would all chorus, “It wasn’t me.”

 It helped enormously when we returned from a disastrous holiday in France and the kitchen ceiling had fallen in. 

The whole holiday had been cursed from beginning to end. The gite was rat filled with a temperamental Aga. The weather was the coldest, wettest August on record. The farmer didn’t take as much care over his animals as monsieur Cadeaux had the previous year. Getting to the front door was an obstacle course of cow pats. My mum had always been convinced that she would be murdered by a cow or a Frenchman, while she was camping, so she spent the week feeling very stressed. When the crab she had bought from the harbour walked off the kitchen table she started smoking again and when I caught her I was sworn to secrecy. Then we drove to Paris for a week and the accelerator cable snapped on the huge roundabouts in front the Arc de Triomphe. Dad managed a temporary fix by commandeering all of our shoelaces and hanging out of the window to pull them with the other hand on the steering wheel. That was the holiday that my sister discovered a passionate dislike for goats cheese. 

Although the trip had been an experience and not all bad, (first Big Mac, discovering that rats are quite good company at 3am when you read all night)  we were all glad to be home. The memory of telling each other that before we opened the door to the kitchen will stick with me forever. It was like one of those cinematic moments where life is perfect, a door swings open and everything has changed. The shower had been leaking for the whole two weeks we were away and brought the entire kitchen ceiling down. We stood. Looking. Silent. Mouths flapping like fish. Then a little voice said, “It wasn’t me!” and we all joined in like the film where they all pretend to be Spartacus. And we laughed.

The reason I was reminded of this story was because our Prime Minister was asked by a journalist on the BBC where he had spent the last ten days and his answer had strong ‘it wasn’t me!’ vibes.

There are several responses to that question that would have worked. My suggestions include:

Eating all the cheese

Avoiding the mother-in-law

At home 

Nowhere. It’s Christmas. No one goes anywhere at Christmas, it’s like a Zombie Apocalypse.

Fighting over the last purple chocolate in the Quality Street tin, pah, plastic box. Have you noticed how much smaller they are now?

Watching my small children opening their gifts from Santa and then playing with the box.

Visiting friends. We are very lucky to have a pal with a big house.

He said, “I’ve been, in, pah, I’ve been in this, ha, Country, pah ha, why do you think?”

However simple the question was, with numerous answers that wouldn’t have raised suspicions he went for the nothing-to-see-here answer, immediately letting us know that he probably wasn’t in the country (nothing wrong with taking a holiday) and that it was probably really dodgy.