WOULD you like to impress friends, strangers and edit Radio 4’s Today by telling the same lies every other fantasist does? Take my accredited course in how.
Be a child prodigy
Other people were just children. You’re better than that. Your childhood was one of overcoming adversity, passing GCSEs while unable to read or write and playing pool professionally. Or rather mine was, but invent something equally sensational. Perhaps you spent two years being raised by dolphins while solving the Riemann Hypothesis?
Be the youngest to do something
It’s key to have a solid foundation for later fabulism, so claim to have been the youngest person to have done a thing. It could be skydiving into Machu Picchu, synthesising a new kind of rat, swimming through Kent’s underground waterways or simply unmasking the Zodiac killer. Otherwise later claims may seem to come out of nowhere and lack credibility.
Raise millions for charity
Nobody doubts a charitable fundraiser, so pretend to be one. Let your lies be unrestrained. You unicycled to the South Pole for children with cancer! You surfed an active volcano for six days, raising ten million for Help for Heroes! You tamed a tiger and rode it through the centre of Colchester for Dogs That Unaccountably Feel Sad! It will all be believed.
Beat cancer
It is mandatory for the fantasist to conquer cancer. It should be a type of cancer doctors are unfamiliar with which they tell you is terminal but you refuse to accept. Perhaps you conduct your own research? Certainly you triumph over the odds and are now completely recovered, no impairments, no follow-up treatment needed, it’s as if it never happened.
Have far-flung achievements
Nobody knows anything about other countries so you can say what you like. I claimed to be a visiting professor in Ohio, South Africa and Glasgow, wherever that is, and nobody checked. So whether you say you were supreme court justice of Micronesia, leader of the Cabo Delgado insurgency or president of Tonga, keep it distant.
Imply it’s everyone else’s fault
When discovered, radiate pity. If you hadn’t been marked for greatness as a child then perhaps your horizons would be this low. Perhaps you’d have nothing better to do than poke holes in the inspiring life story of, let’s face it, a demigod. Leave them in your wake. Don’t even levitate until they’re out of view. They don’t deserve your miracle.
