Through lifelong friends — a judge and his wife in North Carolina — we arranged a house-plus-car swap with a couple they knew well. We returned to find a great red-wine stain on our oatmeal carpet, and heard from a local garage that they had put petrol in our diesel car before running it until the engine seized up. They mentioned neither occurrence. Should we tell the judge?
Telling the judge would certainly make him feel awkward — though maybe not as awkward as he may routinely feel in the course of his courtroom work, anyway, given that, as a judge, he is professionally obliged to maintain a straight face when listening to a defendant retail an alibi so fanciful that, when you then re-listen to O. J. Simpson’s, it makes you think, “You know? By comparison this sounds plausible.”
Nor, indeed, as awkward as he might feel when he learns (several house-swaps down the road; and after having been quietly dropped from the Christmas card lists of several former friends) that the American couple he has been foisting innocently on chums around the world have been leaving behind them mini-hurricanes of havoc.
A letter written to a couple so shameless that they leave a trail of destruction without even paying you the courtesy of an apology, let alone an offer to repair the damage they caused, is likely to prove as profitable as investing in sand futures in Saudi Arabia. But your judge and his wife might be grateful to learn of their friends’ behaviour so that — even if they don’t upbraid them for it — they might now avoid inflicting them further on others.
Advertisement
There are sides to even close friends that might shock us if we were to witness them. We all turn a blind eye to certain traits in mates. Otherwise, how would Tom Cruise have friends?
FACING A DILEMMA?
Have you a dilemma of your own?
E-mail: modernmorals@thetimes.co.uk