Industrial disputes are an accepted disruption of our everyday lives. They immobilise us, delay us, frustrate our very best intentions. Where would we be without them?

As excuses, they are a veritable goldmine. Used imaginatively, they provide a good reason for not doing just about anything we don't want to do and for not having done just about everything we ought to have done. But their credibility rating depends not so much on the headline space that a particular dispute attracts but on your skilful manipulation of the likely effects of that dispute.

For instance, 'We won't be able to come and see you on Sunday after all, because of the petrol-tanker drivers' dispute' is too convenient, too easy, too wet a get-out. It leaves the other people thinking (rightly), 'They could have got here if they had really wanted to' and they will resent your lack of imagination in looking no further than the front page of your newspaper for a reason not to visit them.

The secret is to use as your excuse a knock-on effect of the tanker drivers' dispute. Thus: 'We're fortunate enough to have plenty of petrol - more than enough to visit you five times - but because of the tanker drivers' dispute Harry's firm are sending him to Manchester a day early in case the situation in the North-West worsens next week. Isn't it infuriating?'

Similarly, a rail strike is not a good enough reason for not turning up for work. But the same rail strike could make it necessary for you to drive your crippled mother twenty-two miles to an important hospital appointment, wait, then bring her home again.

Creative excusers will not be satisfied to hide behind the headline-grabbing dispute. They will scan the inside pages of the Daily Telegraph, looking for minor industrial squabbles that, with a little dressing up, could have far-reaching implications and effects on their own private and professional lives. Within twenty-four hours of a work-to-rule by German steelworkers in Solingen, for example, they will have created a shortage of cider casks in Taunton.

The great value of industrial disputes as excuses is that, even when the country isn't being paralysed by two hundred different disputes, the threat is an ever-present one. Your ultimate strike excuse for being unable to do something is, therefore, that you were too busy panic-buying.

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