Since we last spoke, I’ve been busy doing things I can’t tell you about, because they relate to certain people’s Christmas presents, and there’s a very real possibility that one of those certain people is YOU.

I’ve also been going swimming quite a lot, because Jess had this mad idea that she wants to be healthy, and since I’m her drive, I have no choice but to get healthy too. The only real problem is that I’m rubbish at it, and my time is mostly spent experimenting with different techniques in the hope of discovering one I can do. At one point I invented a stroke which Jess informed me has been invented previously and named ‘the butterfly’. I seemed quite good at that one, but the next time we went I couldn’t do it any more and so opted instead for another technique which mostly involved flailing. This one, I think, has also been invented already, and is called ‘trying not to drown’.

Still, at least I’m getting some kind of exercise again. Who knows, I might even meet my target on the lardometer one day.

In other news, we went to Next to buy Jess a nice winter coat, and I was just about to enter my PIN number when my phone rang and Mr Barclays told me he’s put a freeze on my card because he thought it might have been stolen. Apparently spending lots of money on Amazon a month before Christmas is suspicious. I told him that I had indeed been doing that, and he said in that case my card should be working again in ten minutes. So we went and killed some time in WHSmith, then went back to Next to pay for the coat, and my card still didn’t work. The nice saleslady spent seventeen hours trying to locate the appropriate phone number to call in this situation, found it, phoned it, and we eventually paid for the coat. Then we went into PC World and tried to buy something else, and it failed again.

Two more phone calls and one more failed purchase later, I think they’ve sorted it out. But it was all very inconvenient, and now I daren’t spend any more suspicious amounts. Of course it would help if I knew how much they consider suspicious, but if nothing else it’s a good excuse to get everyone cheap Christmas presents.

I had an email this morning from Seth in America. Who’s Seth? I wondered that too. He seemed to know me.

Hey Simon-

Sounds good. I’ll attach some photos soon. Checked out your website and there’s some pretty decent art on there–sounds like an interesting gig. I’m cc’ing this to your other email address as well, to make sure you get it.

As for down payment, we could do the first three months, if that’s okay. Let me know and we’ll figure out payment options.

Thanks-
Seth

From: simon_goodway@hotmail.com
To: sethxxxxx@hotmail.com
Subject: RE: your ad on criagslist($1800 / 3br - Beautiful, mostly furnished 3/2 adobe, utilities inc)
Date: Mon, 5 Nov 2007 23:59:35 +0000

Hi Seth,
It’s nice hearing back from you. I would be moving to the States by December and stay in santa fe for 9 months starting Jan. 2008. I’m also okay with rent for $1800 a month . Kindly let the name and address to issue out the payment to along with the total amount I need to pay as down payment to secure the house till I arrive next month. Waiting to get to see some pictures and read from you soon. Take care.
Kind regards,
Simon

From: sethxxxxx@hotmail.com
To: simon_goodway@hotmail.com
Subject: RE: your ad on criagslist($1800 / 3br - Beautiful, mostly furnished 3/2 adobe, utilities inc)
Date: Mon, 5 Nov 2007 14:58:23 -0700

Hi Simon-

I’ll shoot you some more pictures tonight. Give me a call if you’re serious–it’s $1800 a month and we’d like to rent her for at least a few months.

Seth xxxxx
xxx-xxxx

From: simon_goodway@hotmail.com
To: sethxxxxx@hotmail.com
Subject: RE: your ad on criagslist($1800 / 3br - Beautiful, mostly furnished 3/2 adobe, utilities inc)
Date: Mon, 5 Nov 2007 21:36:40 +0000

Hello,
I am Simon, a freelance artist from north London, UK. I saw your ad and would be willing to rent your place for the duration of my stay there in the (santa fe ) United States. I would not mind staying there alone because I need a lot of privacy to myself and my work too. I do not smoke nor have pets but I am sincere, down-to-earth and friendly as well. Do get back to me with your last price per month and the terms of lease. Also kindly e-mail me more pictures if available. Hope to read from you soon.
Best regards,
Simon Goodway.

The first thing I did was to email Seth back and fill him in. The next thing I did was call the police.

“Hello, I think someone’s trying to steal my identity.”

“What makes you think that?” asked a lugubrious voice filled with scepticism that sounded like a cross between Clement Freud and Droopy. I could see I had some convincing to do.

“I’ve had an email from a chap in America who’s had an email from a chap using my name who says he wants to rent the chap’s apartment, but I don’t want to rent the chap’s apartment!” I explained coherently.

“Someone with the same name as you wants to rent an apartment in America,” paraphrased Droopy Freud.

“Well, yes, but not just my name. He says he’s a freelance artist and he lives in north London! There can’t be many of those called Simon Goodway! Okay, I’m not one of those either, but the freelance artist bit’s true, and I did used to live very near to north London! He’s clearly pretending to be me, and I bet he’s got all my bank details too, and it’s all a big scam and he’s going to move to America and become president and everyone will think I’m the president, but I won’t be, because it will be HIM!”

Droopy’s view was that the trickster hasn’t got any more of my details than can be found on the web, and the only victim of the scheme would have been Seth, who would probably have been sent a deposit cheque for too much money and asked to refund the difference, which if he was gullible enough he would have done before the cheque had time to bounce. That won’t happen now that I’ve alerted him to the dishonest nature of Mr “Goodway", but no doubt our friendly criminal will try the same prank elsewhere. Then I expect muggins here will get some angry emails from American landlords saying “Hey! You’ve stolen my money! Give it back!”

Well, if you’re reading this Mr Fake-Me, you aren’t doing a very good job of impersonating me - I haven’t lived in the vicinity of London for years, and I would never write Santa Fe without capitals. Frankly, given the wealth of information about me that’s available on this very website, I’m disappointed. To save you the bother of reading the entire archives, I’ve recently given up my job as a freelance artist to work as a ferret trainer in Outer Mongolia, I’ve changed my name to Ignatius J Reilly, and I’m easily recognised by my forked tongue and a third nipple in the middle of my forehead. Use those details and your crimes are certain to go undetected.

I thought that whenever you call 999 they say “Which service do you require?", but on this occasion they just said “Hello, emergency services,” leaving me to take the initiative and say “Can you send me a fire engine please?”

But I should probably begin at the beginning.

It was about eleven o’clock last night, and we were sitting in front of the TV watching Heroes while our potatoes cooked, when all of a sudden the lights and the TV all went off and we were sitting there in darkness.

“Oh, not again,” we thought.

This time I was faced with less difficulties than during our last power outage - I was easily able to locate the torch, and I know where the fusebox is now. Unfortunately it’s locked, and the chap next door has the only key, I having yet to get round to asking the landlady to give us one. I went outside to wake the neighbour up, but I didn’t get that far. The moment I left the house, an old man accosted me.

“Do you live here?” he said.

“Yes,” I said.

“Our caravan’s on fire,” he said.

The large field in which our house is set is an official site of the Caravan Club, and as such we occasionally get holidaymakers setting up home in it. I looked over at the caravan in question, and sure enough, there was an ominous orange glow underneath. At this point the fire looked fairly contained, and I thought perhaps he just needed a big bucket of water with which to extinguish it, so I said - probably rather stupidly - “What can I do to help?”

“Call the fire brigade,” came his fairly inevitable answer. So I did.

He and his wife - she wearing only a dressing gown - were both out of harm’s way by this point, so there was no real danger of anything more serious happening than the loss of a caravan, unless it decided to explode spectacularly. We stood a long way back just in case, Jess and I offering them profuse apologies that we couldn’t offer them a cup of tea because their flaming caravan had shorted our electricity supply. Or possibly vice versa, but I thought it best not to suggest that cause and effect scenario.

It must have been at least twenty minutes before the fire brigade turned up, by which point the flames and the smoke were rising high enough that onlookers could no longer be forgiven for assuming we were celebrating bonfire night a few days early, and a couple of other villagers came along to see what was going on. Unfortunately, there was still no sign of life from our neighbours - I’d been counting on the noise of the fire to rouse them so I wouldn’t have to be discourteous enough to do it myself.

Eventually the fire brigade arrived and did their stuff. There wasn’t a lot left of the caravan by that point.

It transpired that the couple had come away for the weekend because it was the chap’s seventieth birthday. He thought that a nice relaxing carvanning holiday would be a suitably pleasant way to mark the occasion. Yes, well.

The neighbour still hadn’t woken up, so I very guiltily knocked on his door until he did. He then gave us our electricity back and took the former owners of a caravan inside for the cup of tea we’d failed to provide, and so our role in the excitement was over.

We went and watched the end of Heroes.

Hmm, my plan to blog more regularly hasn’t really worked out, has it?

I was absolutely determined at the very least to do a blog by Hallowe’en so I could say “Don’t forget to carve a pumpkin and send me pictures for the annual pumpkin carving competition“. But I didn’t, so that didn’t happen. And so another tradition falls victim to my being too busy/lazy/rubbish to keep it up.

Which is a pity really, because we bought some massive pumpkins from the local farm shop. Although I haven’t been able to locate the battery charger for my camera since we moved, so even if I’d bothered to both announce the contest and carve my pumpkin, I still wouldn’t have been able to enter.

Anyway, what can I tell you about that’s more interesting than my failure on the pumpkin front? I was going to relate the tale of how Sunday turned into a bit of a disaster, what with me driving all the way to Manchester (though starting from somewhere closer than here), only to immediately turn around and drive all the way back again, but now that I finally get round to blogging it seems so long ago that it happened that I should probably put the unhappy incident behind me and move on. Which unfortunately doesn’t leave me with anything else very exciting to tell you. Life has been the usual routine of sitting at home doing lots of drawing, occasionally broken up by my other less profitable job of taxiing Jess to and from the university.

I think Jess is planning on learning to drive at some point, which would probably be sensible, but I may miss having excuses to visit the campus. I like to soak in the atmosphere and pretend I’m still intellectual. In reality, the side of my brain that does logic - the right hemisphere, is it? I forget without looking it up - has atrophied completely since I commenced my current non-brainial occupation. I expect you saw that thing that went around the web the other week where you saw a woman spinning round and if the right side of your brain is dominant you initially saw her spinning one way, and vice versa (if you didn’t, here it is. And apparently it’s the left hemisphere). Well, I stared at it for hours and no matter what I tried I couldn’t force myself to see her spinning the logical-hemisphere way. On the other hand, I saw a bit of Countdown for the first time in several years and beat Carol at the numbers game, but if that’s the most I can say for my intellectual capacity then I fear for my life if I ever find myself engaged in a battle of wits with a chicken.