[Update notice: Black Ink has new content]

I have been aware for some time now that there are a distubring number of people in the world who look like me – my friends keep telling me about spotting them. I’m not sure what we all did in past lives to wind up with this affliction, but the fact remains, there are a good number of us. One of my friends suffers from the terrible affliction of running into me on his holidays – it’s happened to him a couple of times, including one occaision where he went on holiday to Norway, and found me running the hotel he was staying in. And this version didn’t just look like me – he spoken English with my accent, and apparently had similar mannerisms and demeanour.

The poor sod was almost put off his Akavit, but reported that a few glasses soon cured the shock he was feeling, so that was all right. I’m still slightly worried about it, but he enjoyed his holiday.

However, what I had not realised until this morning is that not only are there people who look like me out there, but that there is at least one man out there with exactly the same name as me. This is a little troubling, as it turns out that there’s been a mix-up at some point, and that for most of my working life, I have been paying my National Insurance contributions into his account. I think it’s all more or less sorted now (although I need to call the national insurance people in October to confirm a few things) but still, how hard can identity theft be, if this sort of thing happens by accident? It’s taken them six bloody years to notice that while I’ve been employed and paying tax, I haven’t been paying national insurance, for Christ’s sake!