To most of you, it was just a news story, but to me it was something more. In , a year-old former public schoolboy named Andrew Smith arrived in New York to take up a place at art school. With no hope of paying, he signed an American Express voucher belonging to another Andrew Smith and scarpered, but was caught by the FBI, charged with fraud, and sent home to south-east London to await trial.
This was strange, yet still short of bizarre. That came next. Smith did a runner to France, where he became a celebrity cat breeder and hit trouble only last year, when he called the Pierre with an offer to pay back the money he owed. Rather than accept, they alerted Interpol, and on 19 February of this year, Smith's home in Bourg-en-Bresse was raided by 10 gendarmes who had failed to wonder whether he would in fact be in.
He wasn't, went into hiding, and was at large until a fortnight ago, when he was finally apprehended in Lyon. He is currently on hunger strike in a French prison. Until I got to the end. This was where Smith claimed that he never meant to sign someone else's credit-card slip, but that the hotel staff had mistaken him for another Andrew Smith, who had stayed there earlier.
To the lay person, this defence may sound lame, implausible, preposterous even, but I know where he's coming from and I've got at least 7, countrymen who are with me on this. If we banded together and marched over to France, we could probably spring him ourselves. Allow me to explain. There's this joke that I've always loved. It's old and may strike some readers as mildly profane, though I can't help but see it as poetic and strangely moving.
It goes something like this. If I spy the buffalo sweeping majestically across the plain, I name him Running Buffalo. If the eagle swoops above, he will be Flying Eagle. Anyway, why do you ask, Two Dogs Humping? Like any decent person, I can empathise with poor Two Dogs, forever having to spell his name three times over to querulous bank tellers and at airport check-ins.
