Who's sorry now?

I'm sorry for so many things, right back to letting my best friend Susan take the blame for upsetting the ink pots in Standard II to forgetting my gran's birthday, to not turning up for a date with Simon Smallwood just because his trousers were always just a little bit too short, to getting the date of a concert wrong in the listings pages 20 years ago when everyone turned up on the wrong night. I'm sorry, OK? I'm sorry.

That's what reading The Apologist does for you. It gets you raking back through your conscience and before long, you can find yourself apologising for everything you've done wrong in your life, plus a few other things as well.

Apologies are very in at the moment. Politicians like assuming a pious air and apologising for things that weren't their fault and happened over a hundred years ago (apologising for things that are their fault and are happening now is quite a different matter). But once you've read Jay Rayner's book, it will be very hard ever again to hear the words "I'm sorry" with a straight face.

Jay Rayner's story concerns Marc Bassett, a restaurant critic. When a chef kills himself in a bread oven with one of Marc's slating reviews taped to the door, Marc, understandably, feels responsible. After a crisis of conscience, he goes round to apologise to the chef's widow.

And then he can't stop - he apologises to the chap he tricked out of his job, to his ex girlfriends, ex-non-girlfriends - to everyone he can. And he makes such a superb job of it that he ends up head-hunted by the UN for its Office of Apology and Reconciliation. He goes on to apologise to black Americans for slavery, to the Aborigines for Australia, to victims of the Holocaust...

And the dreadful thing is that it is all so believable.

He comes unstuck in the end, of course, but it's fun on the way. I liked this book, but if you don't, all I can say is "Sorry."

* If you really want to make a meal of it, then wallow in Jay Rayner's website www.the-apologist.co.uk.

Published: 19/04/2005