I am spending most of my days messing round on the internet. I am sure many of you can empathise with that. It's horribly addictive and I can easily get into a cycle of checking my ten favourite websites, then starting again in case anything has changed.
Last night I did that thing that I'm sure we all occasionally do, and put my own name into Google to see what people were saying about me and also about people with the same name as me.
There's quite a few new things since I last did this a few months ago, largely thanks to Warming Up.
My favourite discovery was at a website called
http://www.obsess.com/ where a fellow called Tom wrote about a piece of fanmail that me and Stew sent him some time ago. This is what he said,
"When I was a kid I got a relatively lengthy letter from Stewart Lee in reply to some fan mail I'd sent in to Fist Of Fun or something. In the corner of the last page was written
Dear Tom,
I have no interest in you or your life.
Love,
Richard Herring"
This really made me laugh. He has proved the point by scanning in the said letter (I think it is around 28th July entry this year) so you can go and look if you want.
I remember we used to take great pains to respond to all fanmail (and this was in the days when email was in its infancy and most people didn't have it). Writing out replies in hand took an awful long time. I seem to remember spending about a month replying to our post bag after one TV series. So it was no wonder that I got a bit silly and skittish and wrote stuff like that on the occasional reply.
It wasn't as if I didn't think Tom would get that it was a joke, which he clearly did. I left a comment on the page apologising for my rudeness and added "If it's any consolation I still have no interest in you or your life." Tom emailed me back to say "If anything I feel your interest has waned slightly, which is ideal."
I like it when I am unexpectedly able to travel through time and make myself laugh. I can only do it one way so far, but I'm working on travelling backwards. If only I coudl tell the 21 year old me that I'd spent 18 months writing about cocks, I'm sure he would laugh his head off.
I also noted the huge number of dead Richard Herrings that are mentioned in google (mainly in family tree pages) and it struck me that Dave Gorman could do a show where he found maybe a million Dave Gormans from the past and then dug up their bones and made a giant super Dave Gorman monster skellington out of them. I emailed him with this idea. He said he would definitely do it. He also knew that a Dave Gorman had died on the Titanic (of course he did) so recovering his bones for the Dave Gorman skelllington would make an excellent and expensive episode for the TV series.
I suggested he could call it "Are You Dead Gorman?"
I don't even want any money for coming up with this brilliant idea. Just the pleasure of seeing the Dave Gorman Monster skellington with a million skulls would be enough for me.
Finally I found a page called Cell pals in which inmates in America are looking for people to correspond with. One of these prisoners is in Alabama and is called Richard Herring. Here's what he has to say "Single White male, 36 yrs.old looking for someone to write (nothing else for right now) I am currently serving a life sentence on burglary charges. Hobbies include, watching t.v. (sports), music, working leather, exercise and playing chess. I'm blonde, blue-eyed, 6'1", 185 lbs. Anyone interested can write to me and I'll surely return all letters with a reply. Thanks."
It was weird to think I have a namesake who is serving a life sentence. They treat burglars harshly out there. It is strange to feel sympathetic to a man merely because he shares the same name as you. Even when he is physically very different and has no similar hobbies (though I don't mind a bit of chess).
I considered writing to him. We could at least play chess through the mail. He's not going anywhere.
But I'm a bit scared of him. The hobby of "working leather" sounds a bit intimidating.
