It was the third time in a row that she had cancelled our date for drinks. The first time she’d forgotten. The second time she remembered a previous engagement and the third time she claimed she’d got the dates mixed up. The next day I got the text she always sends: ‘Sorry darling, I’m such a flake!’
I used to have friends. Now I have flakes — people who are always screwing up arrangements to meet. Flake has become the catch-all explanation and excuse for the bad manners or bad behaviour of friends and loved ones.
Cosmo Landesman and Freya Wood discuss the modern affliction of flakiness:
We all know about ladies who lunch. But what about the ones who forget you were even having lunch? This kind of woman — let’s call her the flake fatale — will feign remorse and say: ‘I’m such a flake! Can we do it next week? Please?’ Or when she fails to turn up to a party where you had planned to meet —because she got pissed at another party — she will say with pride: ‘How flakey was that!’
I know a girl who forgot to tell her boyfriend that he’d been dumped and their Valentine dinner cancelled. The poor guy waited at the restaurant for nearly two hours. I asked her how could she be so cruel? ‘I’m not cruel,’ she protested, ‘just a bit flakey.’
Men can be flakey too, but they tend to reserve the tag for other men. As in ‘that guy is such a flake!’ It’s too fluffy a term for blokes. So a man will confess to being a ‘screw-up’, an ‘idiot’ or, in rare moments of honesty, ‘a total shit’ — but never a flake.
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