The day I was mistaken for an author.

I want to start an occasional series of anecdotal posts about travelling. First up, a trip to Europe in November 2001 that took me and Anne through Singapore. Earlier I had answered a few email questions for my pal Cheng tju ( who once gave me an old copy of Malaysian artist Lat's Town Boy, soon to be published in the States by my publisher First Second) to put together an article for the Straits Times, the English language paper of Singapore, in connection with the upcoming release of the From Hell movie. I had sent ahead an official photo from a set that Liz Pickering recently came round and shot as my last set was taken some ten years previously and they were starting to look like a memento of some other bloke.
Anyway, we boarded the 707 of Singapore Airlines at Brisbane airport November 10 and grabbed a newspaper to browse, when there in front of me was my own mug.

You should be able to click-enlarge that enough to read it. BUT THE ARTICLE WAS ABOUT SIMON WINCHESTER !!!- author of The Surgeon of Crowthorne( 1998).
"(from interview) There's a book by Jonathan Green called Chasing the Sun, which is a history of dictionary making. And I was actually reading this book in the bath one winter's day about two years ago. And there was a footnote which said, you know, in a rather offhand way that, of course, readers will be familiar with the extraordinary story of Dr. W. C. Minor, the American lunatic murderer who was imprisoned in Broadmoor and became a prolific contributor to the OED.
I remember vividly sitting up in the bath and saying I've never heard of this story. And I rang one person in your office, Elizabeth Knowles, who you'll know well, I dare say, and said, "Elizabeth, do you know anything--" well, first of all, I apologized and said, "It's rather vulgar. I'm calling you from my bath in America, but do you know anything about this chap called W. C. Minor?"
And she said, "Well, as a matter of fact, I know rather more about him than most people because I wrote a paper about him for a journal, a quarterly, I think, published in Madison, Wisconsin called "Dictionaries." And if you'd like, if you get out of the bath, I'll fax it to you and you can read it when you're'toweling yourself dry," and so she did.
And I read it and I thought if I can get access to the Broadmoor files on this man, then perhaps there's rather a good book to be written."

Cheng Tju, when we met up with him at the other end of the flight, was crestfallen. Eddie Campbell was in fits of mirth. The Campbell piece appeared a month later with the same photo, confirming in the minds of many in Asia that English people all look alike. As for Simon Winchester, did he get a tearsheet from his publisher's publicity department and wonder who the Hell that other bloke is?

Will the real Simon Winchester please stand up?


I know what it is! it's that thing we do with the hand on the chin, isn't it.