Making stuff up on the spot

Everybody lies. Everybody. But when it comes to lying under pressure, most of us suck at it.

Spontaneous bullshitting is an art. In fact, there's a whole form of live theatre dedicated to it. (I suggest joining an improv group if you're really serious about this. If nothing else, it will make you a little less serious.)

When I was 16, I went to Paris with my friends – my first holiday ever without adults. Having been fully briefed by my parents, I was determined to be sensible and not get murdered. Early on in the holiday, a potential murderer young Parisian guy approached us in a park and asked me my name.

I had a miniature internal freak-out at the potentially fatal consequences of giving personal information to a stranger.

Me: *looks around* Umm... Grass. And *points to friends* this is Tree, Flower... Bush and... Stick.”

I swear characters do this a lot in bad comedies. Those are probably the only instances where the other party is dumb enough to fall for it. Unless you're lucky, like I was, and the person you're trying to lie to has a limited knowledge of English.

Anyway, turns out I wasn't the only one making things up as I went along.

Parisian: Grass! You have a beautiful name. My mother- no! -my grandmother's name is Grass!

Setting aside the highly unlikely possibilities that a) anyone actually thinks the name 'Grass' is beautiful and b) some old lady in France is actually called Grass, Parisian was quite clearly bullshitting too. Changing his mind halfway through a sentence just made the already terrible lie even worse.

It's just occurred to me that maybe Parisian knew all along and his response intended to display some kind of socratic irony. But perhaps I'm giving him too much credit.

Anyway, the best spontaneous lie of the day was one of my friends 'suddenly realising' that we had to go.