Delaying tactics

Why can’t anyone agree to the smallest thing any more without asking you to put it in an email? I rang a friend and asked him to have lunch with me this week and he said, ‘Can you put that in an email?’ Well, I told him, I suppose I could put it in an email but the email would only say, ‘Will you have lunch with me?’ Yeah, he said, that will do.

Turns out he was suffering from aide- memoire syndrome, the need to see something in writing. The urge had apparently overwhelmed him to the point where it had become impossible to enter into any form of human encounter without an exchange of letters agreeing the terms of engagement beforehand.

The tendency has coincided with a rise in ridiculous conversations where someone you bump into or telephone greets you with the words: ‘I’ve just emailed you.’ When you ask what it says they insist you read the email, which inevitably invites you to lunch. Of course the only correct reply to this question, if you want to be fashionable, is: ‘I don’t know, I haven’t got my diary on me.’

It is no longer decent to agree to any invitation without at first being a bit sniffy about it and declining with the proviso that you will check your diary and see whether by some freak of forward planning you can in fact make it. This means that you must always have just misplaced your diary. Anyone who has their diary intentionally about their person is not going to enjoy a happy social life.

It is more polite to leave an inquiry festering gently for at least three days, after which you should ring back and say you can make it after all.