Sorry I'm Late - I am a criminal

but I am not the bad guy

Sam and I went to see a West End play that my parents had recommended from their visit to London a few months before. The play was three hours long with two intervals (2!) and when we arrived, we were surprised to see that we were sitting in the third row.

“Wow, great seats,” Sam said.

We took off our coats and scarves and settled in, enjoying the view so close to the stage. An hour into the show, at the first interval, we were chatting in our seats when someone stumbled into my leg.

“You’re in our seats.” I looked up to see a tall man standing over me.

“What?” I said, confused.

“You’re in our seats. Get up,” he said.

He was holding a beer and sneering at me.

“I think maybe you’re in the wrong row?” I said. It had happened earlier with a woman insisting we were in her seats, when she was actually in row D.

“Our seats are C6 and C7. You’re sitting in our seats. Move.”

“WHY are you being SO RUDE?” I asked him, suddenly furious. I stood up. That’s when I realized he was about 6’2.

But, so what? We had our tickets had been scanned at the door, and I knew our tickets said seats C6 and C7, because I’m not an absolute IDIOT, like this man. I was also baffled at how aggressive and hostile he was being. A woman appeared by his side.

“They’re in our seats,” he told her.

“How? Where have you even been? You missed the first hour of the play,” I said to him.

“We were late, so we had to watch it on a screen. And you took our seats. Now move,” he said. He looked at us, disgusted, like we were criminals who had stolen their third row seats when we thought they were no-shows.

I grabbed my phone to pull up the tickets. There they were. “C6 and C7.” I was just about to wave them in front of this man’s face when the red-hot realization hit my body before it registered in my brain.

I sat back down. “Omigod, omigod,” I say to Sam. It’s sort of a given in these situations that I am the confrontational one (American female) and Sam is the polite one (British male), but in this instance, Sam also began getting outraged at the man’s behavior.

“Let’s grab an usher,” Sam said.

“No, no, no,” I say to Sam. I start grabbing our coats and bags.

“What are you doing?” Sam asked.

I didn’t know how to tell him that yes, we were sitting in the correct seats. Except we were sitting in my parents’ seats from six weeks earlier. The tickets on my phone said October 15^h. It was actually December 3^rd. That’s why the seats were so good – my parents had purchased them for themselves.

My dad had forwarded me the tickets via email so I had their schedule. And somehow, the ticket scanner at the door hadn’t caught the mistake, and because this man and woman were late, we were able to sit in their seats during the first act, without being caught.

I began frantically searching my email for our real tickets. This could still be fine. This evening could still be salvaged. I just had to find the correct tickets and we would move to our real seats.

Except nothing came up. Absolutely nothing. I had somehow written the play in my calendar, booked a pre-theatre dinner nearby ahead of time at an Italian restaurant and yet not actually purchased the theatre tickets.

Oh no. Oh no. Oh no.

Somehow, mercifully, there were actually two empty seats in the same row and other people who had witnessed the kerfuffle moved over, as the hostile man and woman sat in their rightful C6 and C7 seats.

With my tail between my legs, I mumbled something vague about, “parents….tickets …somewhere…weird?” to the rude man and moved over. He looked arrogant and pleased to be right. Sam and I sat in C4 and C5, right next to them. The lights dimmed to black and the second act began.

I was shaking. I was watching a play I hadn’t paid for. And now I had to sit here for the next two hours next to this jerk. This jerk who gets to be the vindicated one, whereas I am the actual grifter.

I whispered the situation to Sam, and we both sat a little lower in our seats. I could barely concentrate on the play, feeling like I was going to be hauled out and arrested at any moment.

And then. The woman with the man started TALKING during the LIVE PLAY. In the third row! Where the actors could hear her! And I couldn’t even shush her because I had given up all my pious audience privileges. She was droning on and on.

And then. THE MAN FELL ASLEEP. How do I know this? How do we all know this? He started snoring and when people started turning around to stare, the woman started thumping his cheek to wake him up, and he kept brushing her off so he could keep sleeping.

I began to relax a tiny bit. “Everyone in this theatre likes us more than these assholes,” I whispered to Sam, even though we were the literal criminals. He whispered back, “This is an incredible scam we’ve pulled off without even trying,” he said.

At the second interval, I heard the woman speak in Spanish to the man. I could only understand two words. “Muy aburrido.”

Very boring. She was saying the play was very boring. They spoke a bit more and then Sam said, “Look! Look! They’re leaving!!!” And they were. They gathered their coats and lingered in the aisle for an agonising two more minutes and then before the third act began, they were gone.

I have never felt so exhilarated during a theatre performance that I barely remember. Because the play? The woman was right – it was very boring.

If a polite British person had come up apologetically and inquired if we were in the right seats, it would’ve been so different. I didn’t even know I was capable of yelling, “WHY ARE YOU BEING SO RUDE” to a man twice my size in public, but his arrogance had astonished me. Perhaps because I’ve been living in England for so long, where most grievances go unspoken (until they’re ranted about later) – or muttered under the breath at most.

My favourite examples of this is the English urban legend about two strangers sitting across from each other on the train. A woman, who had purchased a packet of biscuits, opens her packet, eats one biscuit and places it back on the table. She’s astonished when the man across from her reaches over and takes one of her biscuits and eats it. So, then she reaches over and takes one of her biscuits, making her point that these are actually her biscuit pack. Incredibly, the man takes the next biscuit. It goes on this way until the packet is finished, the woman and the man becoming increasingly annoyed at each other but neither saying anything.

At the end of the journey, the woman steps off the train and onto platform. She opens her bag and sees her unopened packet of biscuits. Hers had been in her bag all along. She had been actually eating his biscuits all along. And neither had said a word. The shock. The horror. The shame in being the bad one when you were convinced you were morally superior.

And at the play that evening, I was that woman.

Sometimes this urban legend story is told about a bag of crisps or a packet of cigarettes, but it’s always the same. The play saga doesn’t work well because in this story, I’m American and the man was Spanish and inebriated. So instead of, say, him sitting in the aisle to avoid a confrontation or me shuffling out backwards bowing to him in embarrassment, we were both mere seconds away from flicking each other and yelling, “HOW DARE YOU! YOUR MOTHER SHOULD BE ASHAMED!” – that is, until I realized I was the one who had stolen the theatre seats.

Anyway, the urban legend from the train, to me, is what living in England is like in a nutshell. The other day at the bookshop, we had some small chocolates in a bowl by the register. They were covered in red foil and a man paid for his books and then took one of the sweets and popped it into his mouth, with the foil still on and walked out the door. Sally and Gregg (both British) were too stunned to say anything and the man left, chewing the chocolate and foil together.

(Did the man spit it out in his hand? Did he swallow the foil? Did he spit it out and curse the bookshop? We’ll never know).

I wanted to marry Sam for many reasons but three important ones stand out: he doesn’t like playing video games, he’s loyal and we dislike the same people. But we had a big fight right after our engagement. We’d been to a French restaurant and he’d been served raw chicken and rather than complain, he preferred to starve silently, lest we embarrass or bother the chef or waitress. But really, he didn’t want to embarrass himself.

It bothered me, because what if he was too shy to make a big deal when it really mattered? I remember, saying slightly hysterically, “If I am silently choking in a restaurant, would you be able to scream and shout and get the attention of everyone to save my life?” And Sam was so disgusted that I thought the two incidents – being served inedible food versus DEATH OF HIS FUTURE WIFE – were the same that I cannot bring up this memory without another fight beginning.

And yet, would I really want the opposite? A demanding, loud partner who embarrassed me? No, I’d much rather be the one embarrassing their partner. In all relationships, we play different roles and my role in ours is to be the annoying one in restaurants and hotels.

It wasn’t always this way. I used to be incredibly shy, but getting older and working at the bookshop have both helped me overcome this, to the point that almost nothing fazes me anymore. When you’ve lived over 30 years and worked in retail or customer service, you will have seen first-hand how strange people can be. You will have endured requests where the only reasonable reaction is: “Are you kidding me, because I legitimately cannot tell?”

The people behaving badly have truly have freed me from anxiety – once you’ve seen a man ask for a bowl of ice cubes to soak his sweaty feet in at a Centre Parcs, asking a hostess if you can move to a window table is small potatoes.

Sam thinks I take this lesson too far in that I always think my requests are in the realm of normal. That I’ll never personally cross over into “batshit crazy” territory. He says that everyone thinks they are the barometer of socially acceptable – that’s how people do things like floss on the bus or stroke a stranger’s hair on escalators.

Ninety-nine percent of customers at the bookshop are pretty normal. However, we have a book shelf ladder, just like the one Belle glides on in Beauty and the Beast, and every week, a grown woman will come in and ask if she can stand on it and can I take a photo of her doing so while she sings, “Little town, it's a quiet village, every daaaaay like the one beforrrrre!” (I, myself, have done this many times and always oblige. Because this is normal. It’s abnormal NOT to want to do that.)

Last week, a couple walked into the bookshop. The man and woman both had brown hair and glasses. They browsed the tables for a bit and then approached the register together. They stood awkwardly in front of me, making it clear that they were not paying together.

The man paid for a book of Japanese ghost stories. The woman then paid for a nonfiction book about the importance of friendships. As soon as her payment went through, they exchanged books.

“Happy anniversary,” they said to each other. They looked at me looking at them. “It’s tradition. We each pick out a book here and buy it for the other one.”

They tell me they’ve been together 21 years and today is their wedding anniversary (married for 14 years).

Sally, my fellow bookseller for the day, joins the conversation. “She fell in love with him in a nightclub because he was reading a book.”

“Norwegian Wood,” the man says. The woman smiles, remembering. “She was so posh,” the man says.

Then a woman comes into the shop, and she buys 17 erasable pens for her 12-year-old daughter’s upcoming birthday party at a karaoke bar. Cute pens are like crack for tweens.

“I’ve told her they can only choose three Taylor Swift songs,” she says. She says the boys have requested, “Bye Bye Bye” by N’Sync. Apparently it’s back in the charts after 24 years because after being featured in Deadpool.

Recently, we hosted an indie book publisher’s annual party. The editor kept telling us that people were cancelling left and right and not to expect too many people. He was wrong. About 70 people showed up, the bookshop was completely packed and hot and sweaty. And I was the only person working that evening.

I can’t open wine bottles with a corkscrew without a lot of panic and grunting because I’ve never worked in a pub before, and I don’t drink wine. Before I do events, Gregg has to open four bottles ahead of time and leave them in the fridge for me because there’s nothing quite like being brought to tears as a literary crowd politely waits for an idiot to figure out how to open their white wine.

For some reason, on that particular evening, everyone was ordering gin and tonics. When I ran out of normal gin, the only other bottle I could find was labelled “cardamom gin.” I showed this to the customer, Will, and he agreed that that would be fine.

At the end of the evening, I asked him how the cardamon gin was. Will shuddered and said, “It was like licking a French person’s armpit.”

It did not stop him from ordering it three times in a row.

As I’m making a coffee the next morning, I am wearing an old college sweatshirt, glasses and beanie because it’s cold that day and I woke up late, hurrying to get to the bookshop to open in the morning.

“We need to light a candle,” I say to Sally and she tells me I can’t light any of the wintry Christmas ones because they will sell, so we settle on an orange cinnamon one.

We have a new bookseller named Jasmine who is in her early twenties and sounds just like Nico when she sings and plays guitar. She is so talented that it is odd to be around her and see her acting like a normal person. You would easily walk by her and not know she has this dark, gorgeous river running deep in her soul. Imagine doing laundry with Joni Mitchell or cleaning toilets with Stevie Nicks. That’s how it feels to work beside Jasmine.

Gregg also plays guitar and I say we should form a band and I’ll just play the tambourine and Jasmine says, “Actually the tambourine is quite hard to play.”

My parents recently visited London and I don’t know why my dad keeps doing this, but his new “thing” is to ask people, “Aren’t you afraid AI is going to take your job?” It is so incredibly annoying and has led to many fights. He thinks writers and copywriters will be completely replaced by AI in less than five years.

“Why do you want AI to take my job?” I finally ask him, and my dad says that’s just fascinated by it. He’s also been an early adopter of any new technology. My mom says I shouldn’t take it personally because he’s asking everyone he meets if they are scared of AI taking their job.

Look, if there was a guy punching everyone in the face on the street, I’ll still be angry when it happens to me.

Then over breakfast with a family friend, who is a film producer, my dad asks her, “Aren’t you afraid AI is going to take over the industry?” The woman, in her sixties, continued to butter her toast without even looking up.

“No, Paul,” she said. “Actors don’t want to star in plays written by a computer.”

She then put her hand over mine and looked at me, blocking my father out. “See, your father is a scientist. You and me, we’re artists. No matter what happens with AI, the world still needs artists.” I want to believe her, but I’m also terrified of what could happen with AI. In that moment though, I focus on buttering my own toast and slathering on rhubarb jam and enjoying the fact that she was able to dismiss my father’s “pot stirring” as my mother calls it.

This year, I’m spending Christmas in England. Will it snow? Probably not. Will I run into Jude Law at the local pub? Unlikely. And will Heathrow Airport be a place where people run into each other’s arms hugging and crying with joy, rather than full of people with jet lag, phlegmy coughs and missing luggage? Personally, I’ve never seen the heartwarming Love, Actually airport montage happen in real life.

I tell this to Sam who has just returned from a trip to Ireland. He said that when he landed in Dublin and went through arrivals, there actually were loads of people embracing and laughing in delight. And, he said, there was also a children’s choir singing, “I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day” and that’s what made it truly magical. There was a live soundtrack and adorable Irish children adding to these jubilant reunions.

AI can’t do that.

***

Later that week, a woman then comes into the bookshop to pick up the new Sally Rooney novel that she had ordered from us. I also see she’s ordered another book and hand it to her as well. It’s “The Five Love Languages” by Gary Chapman. She drops it like it’s on fire.

“That’s not mine,” she says.

“Oh,” I say. I double-check her name and look on our system. “It says you wanted to order it?”

“No,” she insists. “That’s not mine.” She pays for the Sally Rooney book and leaves. It’s the quietest time of day so I start thumbing through it. The basis of the book is that every person has a specific “love language” that they appreciate and respond to more than others.

The five “love” languages are: physical touch, words of affirmation, gift giving, quality time, and acts of service. I first heard about this from a friend when I was living in Beijing. His girlfriend had forced him to read it and he talked about it at every party he went to.

Sam won’t tell me his love language. “It’s not a THING,” he says, in the same tone he says, “I don’t ‘want to live on the coast’ because I’m a PISCES!” I think it is a thing, but it just needs some addendums.

The other day I was at a restaurant sitting next to a man and a woman at lunchtime. The waitress came over and the woman said to her, “He’s allergic to nuts, so could you please tell us which dishes contain nuts?” I’m not sure why the man didn’t mention it himself, but I suspect he didn’t want to annoy the waitress (see above).

I think being the person to ask about food allergies at a restaurant on behalf of your shy lunchmate is its own love language. As is letting your friend tell a story for the 18^th time at a party and not interrupting them. Or not asking, “Did you win?” after your husband runs a cross country race even though for some reason you really, really want to ask this every time.

Or those people on Reddit who document their insane health journeys where they do things like wolf down a 4-liter bucket of yogurt every day for 60 days and then report back to the rest of the internet, so we can all decide not to do that. That’s surely a form of love for humanity.

I’ve lived in London for more than a decade, and my husband is English. However, before I’d even met my husband, my brother met his now-wife at university during his year abroad in the UK. We’ve both married British people, which can be confusing to strangers. Like, why did my brother and I both do this? What are the odds? And annoyingly, why do they live in America and we live in England, so we still don’t see each other often?

My British sister-in-law told me that her mother had only told her she loved her maybe twice in her life. And now, I’ve started to notice that my brother Adam has stopped saying “I love you” to me. We see each other about once a year and when we hug goodbye at the end of the week-long visit, I’ll say, “Love you” and he’ll sort of back away and wave while already turning away.

It didn’t happen overnight. For a few years, he used to say it but just be really awkward about it. And now he just doesn’t say it at all – but he lets me say it. My “I love you” hangs unfinished in the air, mocking me. But the thing is, I hear Adam say, “I love you” to his wife and two kids all the time.

You’d think I’d stop saying it to him by now, but it feels like bad luck not to say it, like how if you don’t tell someone to “drive safely” you feel like you’ve somehow increased the odds of them being in a car accident.

But Adam sends Christmas presents and remembers birthdays. He worries about me when I’m feeling low. When I had Covid, he was the only family member who checked in on me every day. I suspect he does actually love me, but telling me embarrasses him deeply.

My dad is an only child and he does not understand the sibling dynamic at all, but I’m not sure I do, either.

My other older brother Aaron was 22 when he got married in our hometown in Texas. I was a junior in high school. The night before his wedding, I asked him, “I know you love Jennifer, but you don’t love her more than you love us, do you?”

My oldest brother is one of those guileless people who simply cannot lie. Instead he said nothing, but looked guilty.

That was the end of my childhood. A gut punch like no other. When you’re still a child, you don’t realise that your family will change. But of course, it happens all the time. Afterall, your own parents chose each other and had to leave their families.

Oddly, this brother (Aaron) says, “I love you” constantly in text messages and when we are together, but he says it so cheery and casually (“Thanks for the pizza! I love you!”), that I can’t possibly take it seriously.

The other day I was working a different shift on Tuesday at the bookshop because Gregg had fallen ill.

I was putting price stickers on the new packs of Christmas cards when I realized I don’t know how to properly write the £ sign. Sally came over to supervise.

“What’s the American dollar sign, then?” she asks. “An S with two lines?”

“I guess? Or is it one line?” I ask, now doubting myself. That’s how long I’ve been gone.

At that moment, my friend Rowan walked in. “Oh good! You’re here! I was going to leave your Christmas card here for you,” she said, handing me an envelope with my name on it.

This makes me feel like we live in the same sitcom, that I have a spot where people leave me mail. Rowan was walking around the neighborhood hand-delivering Christmas cards. Is there anything quainter than this? My bookshop shift was ending so I joined her.

We made our way down the road and then sat outside the coffeeshop that has the Dalmatian that always visits and this time, the Dalmatian let me pet him. As he sniffed my coffee, I noticed that he had brown spots instead of black spots. The owner said they’re called “liver spots” (rude?) and that because her dog didn’t have the traditional black spots, he was on sale. (No one values brunettes properly).

Sam had his work Christmas party in London last week. He told me that apparently two years ago, before he started working in the company, a woman took the mic and just started singing, Adele’s, “Rolling in the Deep.” The entire song. And it was not a karaoke party. It was a very boring, quiet office party with the lights on, so everyone stood there awkwardly, averting their eyes and sipping their drinks until the singing was over.

It’s a moment that has lived in infamy and Sam was sad to miss it. This year, Sam got back from his Christmas party late and when I was already asleep. He snuck into bed and told me, “It happened again.”

“What?” I asked, half-asleep.

“The same woman somehow managed to get a mic and … she sang Adele,” Sam said.

“Noooooooo!” I said. “But not the same song???”

“The same song,” Sam said laughing. “Rolling in the Deep.”

I was fully awake at this point, laughing so hard, imagining this Christmas party. The stilted small talk. The opening notes of the song. The shock everyone must have felt when this woman took the stage again, at a party that was not supposed to have a stage. The sheer disbelief as it happened again.

AI can’t do that.

When I locked up the bookshop last night, it was windy and dark. I switched off the Christmas lights in the shop window. I walked home on the quiet streets, the homes lit up by Christmas trees and bright white stars in windows.

When I got home, I made a cup of tea and opened a Terry’s chocolate orange (the very best thing about Christmas in England). Sam was watching a music documentary on the BBC. I put my feet up on his legs. Suzanne Vega comes on the screen. The woman who sings this legendary song:

Years ago, Sam and I saw Suzanne Vega in concert at the Barbican. I’m always late and that evening was no exception. We were sprinting but were still going to be ten minutes late, but I reassured Sam that we wouldn’t miss anything.

“Concerts never start on time and artists never play their hit song first,” I said as we darted through the Barbican maze.

But as we ran up to the closed doors, an usher blocked us from entering. We had to wait outside for the first song. The famous lilting beginning of “Tom’s Diner” began. Sam looked at me in a way I would describe as “the opposite of a love language.”

Finally, we were allowed to sneak into the venue and find our seats. Towards the end of the night, Suzanne introduced a song that was new to us.

She said she wrote it about an English boy that she had met at camp in Maine when she was 18 years old. They two had been camp counsellors together, and he was her first love. She had fallen in love with a boy from Liverpool, but they’d had to part ways at the end of the summer, 35 years ago.

She paused and looked out into the audience.

“That boy is here tonight.”

I gasped. We all gasped. I grabbed Sam’s hand. Suzanne Vega picked up her guitar. Tears slid down my face as she played to us, and to him. The absolute privilege and awe to know that the subject of the song, the boy from Liverpool, was sitting in the dark among us, 35 years later.

Now, in our flat in London, as we watch a young version of her sing on the TV, I remind Sam about that night. Though I don’t need to remind him because neither of us will ever forget that moment, that evening, that story, that magic.

The song is called “Gypsy.”

With a long and slender body
And the sweetest softest hands
And we'll blow away forever soon
And go on to different lands
And please do not ever look for me
But with me you will stay
And you will hear yourself in song
Blowing by one day

I begin getting emotional remembering that moment. “AI can’t do that,” I say to Sam.

“No,” Sam says. “AI can’t do that.”

You can read more of my writing by checking out my book, “Sorry I’m Late, I Didn’t Want to Come: One Introvert’s Year of Saying Yes.” (The UK version is “Sorry I’m Late, I Didn’t Want to Come: An Introvert’s Year of Living Dangerously). It’s also been translated and published in the Netherlands, Korea, China, Russia, Germany, Taiwan, Poland and Hungary.

It’s about the year I spent: talking to strangers, performing stand-up comedy, travelling solo, trying out improv, going on friend dates and doing a bunch of extrovert-y things. It’s about being an introvert and trying to extrovert for a full year. I interview brilliant people throughout the book who guide me through these nightmares.

It’s sold over 140,000 copies in the US, nearly entirely by word of mouth. Perhaps you are one of my readers! If so, thank you so much!!!

Reviews for Sorry I’m Late, I Didn’t Want to Come

“I loved it! It’s such a wonderful title, and the book lives up to it’ Nigella Lawson

‘In a world of self-care and nights in, this book will inspire and remind you to do some things that scare you every so often.’ Emma Gannon

‘Hilarious, unexpected and ultimately life-affirming.’ Will Storr

‘Funny, emotional and deeply inspiring, this is perfect for anyone wanting to break out of their comfort zone’ Heat

‘Beautifully written and so funny! I related to it A LOT’ – Emma Jane Unsworth

‘Relatable, moving and fantastically funny’ – Rhik Samadder

‘Tender, courageous and extremely funny, this book will make us all braver.’ Daisy Buchanan

‘A chronicle of Pan’s hilarious and painful year of being an extrovert.’ Stylist

‘Excellent, warm, hilarious.’ Nikesh Shukla

‘You WILL laugh and laugh while reading this.’ Sun

“Very funny, very smart” Liberty Hardy

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