Dialogue: How to be a swaggerer, a brigand, a blackguard or a saint

By JOE BENNETT

I used to hitch-hike a lot.

That, of course, is precisely the sort of thing that middle-aged dull dogs say in order to convince themselves and others that there was a time when they were not middle-aged dull dogs. That once they were devil-may-care, that they lived with a whoop and a ha, and a lust for the strange and the dangerous.

The truth, of course, is dull. I hitched because I didn't have any money. Or if I did, I was too mean to spend it.

But it did me good. Hitching lifts from the sort of people who stop to offer lifts - psychopaths, homoeopaths and other lovelies - I learned one fine thing. I learned to lie.

Hitching is repetitious. The where-are-you-going chat, the why-are-you-going-there chat, the what-do-you-do-for-a-living-oh-how-terribly-interesting chat. It was that last chat in particular that bored me to the marrow. That's why I started lying.

My head at the time was shaven to the scalp. For the lice. Or rather not for the lice. Direct sunlight terrifies lice. Shave your lousy head and the lice shriek as one and scuttle into the dark and clammy sanctuary of your ears.

There your brain eats them. Or the other way round, I can't remember.

Perhaps a bit of both.

Anyway, I'd shaved my head and I was wearing a pair of those trousers with a knee at the pocket that have come back into fashion. I used to carry my passport in that pocket to discourage homoeopaths with wandering hands.

Until, that is, I absent-mindedly forded a river.

Anyway my head was shaven and my knee-pocketed trousers were military green. So understandably the strange little man who gave me a lift asked me if I was in the Army.

I said "yes". It was a lie, of course. It was also a fine moment. Grand vistas suddenly opened, revealing an endless realm of possibility. I could be anyone, invent anything. The world was at my feet.

It was like coming through the Khyber Pass at dawn and suddenly seeing laid out before me the whole of the Chatnagoor Plain, the tendrils of smoke rising hesitantly from the yak-dung fires, the tiny settlements burnished by the rising sun, the dew on the Patapata palms winking like a jeweller's window.

"Right," said the strange little man, "what regiment?" at which point things got a bit sticky. But there was no going back.

We should all do it. We should lie with vigour about all the dull things.

Things like jobs. "I'm a quantity surveyor," says the quantity surveyor at the party and everybody yawns. Why? Because that isn't really what he is. It isn't the heart of him.

No one is really a quantity surveyor. Every quantity surveyor just surveys quantities because he has to feed the gaping brood of nestlings that life has saddled him with. At heart he's no more a quantity surveyor than he's a homoeopath.

At heart, like all men, he's a swaggerer or a brigand, a blackguard or a saint. One who gallops to the rescue of damsels in distress, or more likely, and more excitingly, one who does the distressing.

All the dull stuff should be lied about, the routine stuff, the everyday stuff, because all that stuff is feeble at best, a safety barrier of conformity behind which we take shelter.

Start to lie and the barrier tumbles. The buckles of the straitjacket spring open and the rich winds of freedom tousle your hair. Try it. It's good.

Tell people you're a safari guide or a pimp. Tell them you've had lice. Or even give them a visual description of some plain in India, inventing place names and the local variety of palm tree.

Either they will believe you and catch your imaginative excitement and become happy. Or else they will see through you. And that will make them happy, too. Everyone's a winner.

But lie only about the dull things. Be ruthlessly honest about the bright, exciting things, because these are the things we always lie about. Be honest about money. Tell people exactly what you earn. And be honest about sex.

Tell them exactly how and how often. It will be as exciting as a lie. Admit that by far the best thing about sex is looking forward to it. Or looking back on it. Tell them about the dissatisfactions of the business itself.

Tell them about the noises. They will quiver with delight. They will be purged.

Of course it can all go wrong. Let it. Going wrong is always more exciting than going right. It leads to stories, stories you can lie about later. And if disaster happens, well, hitch out of town. As I am about to do now, to my homoeopathy class.