It’s as I’m scrawling the word “sorry” across a Post-It for the rubbish collectors that the thought seeds itself. Once bagged up, all that Christmas detritus does look like a lot, but is an apology really necessary? Were any of the thousands of apologies I made in 2014 necessary?
“Women live lives of continual apology,” Germaine Greer once said, and out there by the bins in my Rudolf socks I run through some of my most ludicrous. Apologising to the Danish lady who knocked my toddler over in the baked goods aisle at Waitrose seems pretty silly in retrospect, as does apologising to my GP for bothering him that time I contracted laryngitis.
Every email that began with “I’m sorry” or “I’m afraid” will probably only have served to highlight some personal or professional deficiency that might otherwise have passed unnoticed and I’m pretty sure our babysitter could do without my long, panting litany of explanations and apologies every time I sprint back, 10 minutes late, from a night out. This year, I decide, I’m calling time on “I’m sorry”.
Rather than stoop through life atoning for sins I haven’t committed I’m going to stand tall, the thought bubble above my head emblazoned with a defiant: “Yeah — and?” I’m going against the grain, of course. If 2014 was the year mea culpas came into their own, then 2015 will be the apologist’s playground. With social media providing a dizzying new number of platforms on which public figures can act out their cabarets of apology, thinking before you speak, tweet or act will become a quaint old notion.
After all, shame or guilt need only last as long as an Instagram before being wiped away by the most facile words in the English language. Far from demoting you in the public perception, these words now have the power to boost or reignite careers — if employed correctly. Because although 2014 may have ended in a crescendo of (in both cases deeply necessary) superpower apologies — President Barack Obama was mortified about busting up that wedding in Hawaii at the weekend to play a round of golf and Facebook bosses were desperately contrite earlier this week about inadvertently sending web designer Eric Meyer a picture of his recently deceased daughter, Rebecca, as part of their Year In Review feature — back here in little Britain we’re still finessing the art.
Unable to give his Christmas sermon due to a bout of pneumonia, the Archbishop of Canterbury left it three whole days before declaring, like an all important family member whose cracker was left conspicuously un-pulled at the dinner table: “Sorry for missing Christmas.” Meanwhile, Network Rail boss Mark Carne paid dearly — the whole of his £135,000 (Dh749,509) bonus, to be exact — for his own delayed apology after the Boxing Day chaos that left tens of thousands of travellers stranded with their families on the one day of the year when Network Rail’s grotesquely inflated ticket prices might have seemed like a small price to pay for escaping the familial hot house.
Other flubbed or missed apologies last year include the BBC’s limp acknowledgement of bias and Miliband declining to say sorry for forgetting to mention either immigration or the deficit in his keynote party conference speech. Not for the first time, Ed seems to have missed the memo.
These botchers and bunglers are likely to become slick apologists in months to come. Like British Prime Minister David Cameron who was both “extremely sorry” and “very embarrassed” at having broken royal convention by bragging to former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg that the Queen had “purred down the line” when he informed her that Scotland had voted against independence back in September, they will ditch the cold, formal apologies of their predecessors and learn the importance of warm, fuzzy and insincere adjectives — taking their cue from (who better?) the entertainment industry.
When Sony Pictures chairman, Amy Pascal, prostrated herself before us after having exchanged “insensitive” and “inappropriate” emails with a leading producer about Obama, she was careful to add a touch of psycho-babble. The emails were not “an accurate reflection of who I am,” she emoted. Because Pascal was “delving deep” and subjecting herself to a very public therapy session, we forgave her. Using “I’m sorry” as a gateway to the public confessional may be the opposite of the British way, but we’re not what we once were. There is no British reserve left to speak of. We no longer “keep calm and carry on”. As for apologies and explanations, we’re about to get very good at both.
— The Telegraph Group Limited, London 2015