Pagan polygamists, prayer circles and golf invitations – the joy of emails meant for someone else
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Version 0 of 1. Every time Game of Thrones returns for a gruesome, murderous, incesty new season, there is an inevitable story reporting a noted uptake in people choosing names such as Khaleesi or Arya for their newborn babies. The actual numbers are tiny – a handful in the UK, a few in Australia, a smattering in the US – but, in naming their kids after survivors, they are willing them towards a head start in life. Plus, these children of Westeros will grow up with all the benefits of a unique name (no need for additional numbers in an email address) and an inevitable air of glamour, like Kylie, the girl who lived on my street when I was growing up, hopelessly exotic because she wasn’t Nicola or Leanne like everyone else. My name is fairly common. There are at least 143 in the US and 114 in the UK, though I could have told you this without databases, because I’ve been getting emails meant for other people for years. Most of them are trivial. A woman in the home counties was buying a house recently. I sent the email back to her estate agent, along with her contract. I hope it went through. There was a quote for a christening cake, and I wondered if it was meant for the same person whose child’s nursery place I had been offered, and if she was also the one who had booked a makeover for the occasion. These women are experiencing life landmarks that I have not, and may never. I find it comforting, just to know. But there have been times when, like a TV doctor with a photogenic patient, I have become too involved. I spent a few months being invited to play golf by a group of women in Texas, with beautiful, Comic-Sans-emblazoned emails that always ended by wishing me a blessed day. I started to feel like I knew them, Melinda and Milinda, Kelly who had “Don’t waste time – use it up!” as her signature, the ones who were busy with work, the ones who were busy with kids, always filling up their blessed, blessed days. Every time “Golf???” appeared, I felt like they were checking in. “Have you thought about flying over and joining them?” a friend asked, when he had finally got bored of me telling him what they had been up to this week. And I did think about it, because I wondered if the universe was conspiring to send me there, before I remembered I don’t really believe in that sort of thing. I knew that I was an impostor, and that I was behaving badly, and that there was probably a sad Becky Nicholson in the Lone Star state who wondered why she wasn’t being invited to golf any more. I decided the next email would be the last. It appeared, with a checklist of stroke symptoms. I wondered who was at risk of a stroke. If I told them now, I might never find out, and I had grown to care. So the next one would have to be the last one. But they stopped before I could tell them, as if they just knew. I hope Lonely Becky found their number. A couple of years later, I was brought into a prayer circle by a church in Tennessee. I was invited to pray for rashes and whiplash, and heart attacks and cancer. This was, I reasoned, less bad than Texas, because it was essentially a community newsletter. I heard about blood work and X-rays and family feuds and missionary work and endometriosis. And then it got personal, and a churchgoer sent me an email that pondered the nature of heaven and what could and could not be backed up by scripture. Scarred by the memories of my lost golfing friends, I took the chance to come clean and make it right. “You have the wrong person,” I wrote. “Is this your email address?” she replied, which was, in a way, a theological conundrum of its own – it was mine, but not the “mine” she wanted. “It is,” I said, “but I’m not the person you’re looking for.” She took me off the newsletter. And then there was my favourite, the man I will call “Graham”, who delivered a tour-de-force email to his sweetheart explaining exactly why he believed in polygamy and how much he liked her but could never belong to her alone. He talked about paganism and masculinity and self-belief, and compared himself to a very macho animal, all the while maintaining his cool and an impressive dedication to “telling it like it is”. I began to imagine what his house was like: surely a cabin carved out of ancient redwoods, hammered together with iron rods, using only his rough, bare hands. He took form in my mind as Ron Swanson from Parks and Recreation, but in a cape. I wrote back to him straight away, telling him I was not the one, but that I hoped he managed to win her round. A couple of days later, he replied. They had figured out something that worked for both of them. “Thanks for your support,” he said. “Lol.” I am grateful for the Texan ladies and the prayer circle and Graham for their uninvited emails, and I hope that it is harmless to enjoy them, and I wonder if they have been on the receiving end of my mundane appointments or life dramas or pub invitations, too. Perhaps we should do life swaps. An afternoon in a beer garden for a day out on the green. I have always wanted to try golf, if golf just means driving those funny little carts. And I don’t think Khaleesi Nicholson will ever get the opportunity. |