With the exception of "I'm leaving you", the announcement 'I'm terribly sorry but I can't make it' is probably the most difficult about-turn that we ever have to spring on another person. Even if the friend or acquaintance is secretly relieved that we are standing them up, they will still be asking themselves who is more entertaining or more important to us than they are. The onus is on us to convince them that this change of plans has been imposed on us by duty or disaster.

The best reason for being here (where you want to be) and not there (where they expect you to be) is that you cannot leave the telephone even for ten minutes. This is because you are awaiting a call from the hospital 'to hear how the operation went'.

If you have a very high-powered job a business deal involving many thousands of dollars, requiring an instant decision by you, could also transform you into a telephone slave. With so much at stake you can't risk confusing the caller by notifying him at this late stage that you will be at a different number from seven until ten, and thereafter at the original number, etc. Besides, as everyone knows, these calls have a habit of coming through when you are travelling between telephone A and telephone B.

Being burgled is a good reason for breaking an engagement, but suspecting that you have been burgled is even better, because there's less chance of the lie being found out later.

The story goes like this: You have arrived home and discovered evidence that someone has broken into your home, although nothing appears to be missing. Nevertheless you call the police who insist that, for your own protection and for insurance reasons, you draw up a complete inventory of all your possessions. It's the only way, they say, of discovering now -instead of in six months' time - that your silver christening mug has vanished. You are now going through every drawer, cupboard, and shelf in the house.

The beauty of this excuse is that when your friends visit your home two weeks later and find everything exactly as it was, they won't sit there wondering whether the burglary was a cock-and-bull story you invented to get out of attending their boring silver wedding party.

The many misfortunes that can befall a home provide you with a veritable mine of misinformation.

Lightning strikes are far more common than is generally thought, one consequence of them being that you have to stay in to meet the borough surveyor, your own architect, the local builder, and the insurance assessor, all of whom are calling to inspect the damage.

Illness - unless serious, prolonged, and genuine -doesn't wash as a reason for extricating yourself from an engagement; but injury does. The most convincing 'can't make it' excuse I've ever been given came from a friend who telephoned to say she had been struck on the shoulder by a piece of metal that fell out of the sky. No, she hadn't been hurt - a convincing touch, that - but the incident had been witnessed by a policeman who formed the view that the missile could only have fallen from an airliner passing many thousands of feet overhead. The reason my friend couldn't keep our date was that an aircraft investigator from Farnborough was calling on her that evening to examine the fragment and question her about the circumstances of the accident. The lie had the unmistakable ring of truth about it.

Funerals, like illness, have been done to death so to speak and should be avoided at all costs unless you can make them interesting. The funeral of an aunt is an unacceptable reason for cancelling a previous engagement, even if it's true, because no one will believe you. 'The funeral of my father's mistress for thirty-five years', on the other hand, will excite your audience's curiosity and win their sympathy.

Public duty intervenes at the most convenient moments, in the form of jury service or being called as a witness at an inquest ('Why me? I mean, I hardly even saw the accident'). Both have a thoroughly authoritative air of compulsion about them.

Finally, the most cancelled social engagement of them all, the business lunch. I doubt if half the lunches that are fixed, then carefully noted in mutual diaries, ever take place. By being called off they cause more ill-will than the goodwill they were intended to engender. Unless, that is, you have an excuse that the other person can understand and identify with.

There is only one such excuse in business-lunch circles: crawling. A last-minute invitation by a superior or, better still, by the chairman, editor, or chief executive, is a very good reason to call off lunch with anyone else. They'd do it to you and they don't mind you doing it to them, just so long as you level with them by playing down the 'important meeting' aspect of the invitation, which sounds dreadfully pompous, and emphasise the opportunities it offers to ingratiate yourself.

But when you then take out the busty blonde from Accounts, don't take her anywhere you're likely to bump into the businessman you have just stood up.

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