Doppelgänger

With online communication becoming more common in the workplace it is not that unusual for peoples' identities to become confused. There is someone called Robin Maxwell who is sometimes confused with me. We work in different areas so a stray email is usually easy to spot. What is more unusual, and slightly unnerving, is when one is confused with someone else by a physical resemblance. When I was at school there was another, slightly younger boy who I was occasionally mistaken for. Once, my mother confused him for me which must say something about her observation skills. When I lived in Cardiff, an elderly lady once mistook me for someone called Laura. Now, I was much younger, prettier and had quite long hair at the time but, to this day, I still wonder what kind of 1.87m Amazonian figure this Laura must have been. I think the old woman must have been a glacier cherry short of a fruitcake.

I suppose when it gets spooky is when one's Doppelgänger is someone famous (or infamous). Some people have made decent careers as celebrity lookalikes. A young couple made some serious dosh last year as they looked (vaguely) like Prince William and Kate Middleton. My experience of being mistaken for a celebrity of some description was when I lived in Newcastle upon Tyne and I would be frequently mistaken for the Czech Republic national goalkeeper, Pavel Srníček. Now this may, at first sight, appear to be somewhat far fetched but, at the time, we lived within a couple of miles of each other (admittedly, he lived in a much nicer area). He played for Newcastle United back then and much of the confusion could be tied down to a crap hair-do.

In my early twenties I suffered from Alopecia areata - an odd medical condition which meant that I lost patches of hair. This wasn't like male pattern baldness but meant that I had noticeable odd hairless patches on my head. To try and cover this up a styled my hair to be centre parted and held this in place with copious amounts of hair gel and other styling products. It didn't look that brilliant but it covered the bald patches apart from a bit that was missing on my eyebrow. At the time, Pavel Srníček also had some weird centre parted hair-do. However, I don't think he suffered from any random baldness - he was a professional footballer and therefore compelled to have a crap hair style. I did have a look to see if I could find any old photos of myself at this time. In fact, I rather avoided having my photo taken as I was self-conscious about the hair loss. I did find this photo which shows the missing eyebrow (no idea who the blonde was).

The confusion with Srníček seemed to start when I was out on the Town Moor walking the dog. I would get teenage kids shouting out, "Pavel. Pavel! PAVEL!", until I looked around to be asked, "You, with the dog. You're Pavel Srníček, aren't you?" Apparently, explaining that I wasn't Mr Srníček wasn't enough and I was once even asked for his autograph - which was a bit annoying as it's a bugger to spell. The thing was, I eventually started getting stick for his footballing performances: "Pavel. Pavel! PAVEL! You were shite on Saturday!" I actually thought this was rather unfair: not so much that I was getting stick on his behalf but because I seem to recall that he was a pretty decent player. Newcastle were doing very well at that time and his performances for the Czech national side weren't that bad either.

After a couple of years my hair was growing back normally so I abandoned the centre parting and hair gel and reverted to a more conventional side parting. The odd thing was that Pavel did something similar a the same time. However, by this time I had moved on from Newcastle and the mistaken identity had been left behind. I saw a picture of Pavel Srníček recently and he looks quite smart with a goatee beard. I tried to grow a beard once. It came out ginger with flecks of grey: it wasn't a good look.