Doppelgangers

I have a terrible tendency to look at my colleagues or people in the street and then identify them with famous characters or celebrities.

We have a very senior lawyer at work that looks just like the child catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, one of the scariest characters in a children’s film I have ever seen. He has the pointy noise, mad smile, long face and pale pallor which make him a dead ringer for it. One of our very senior Directors looks just like a character from Thunderbirds with a high shiny forehead, thick rimmed glasses and a tendency to hold his hands in front of him and bob them up and down when trying to make a point. One of my colleagues looks just like Mr Bean, and the other day was twirling a pen between his fingers when it pinged off into mid air and he did an impression of a cat washing its face trying to catch it. Someone who is in the back row of the chorus in a current production at my local theatre has her hair in a very shiny bob with a thick fringe and looks just like Wendolene from Wallace and Grommit. Either that or it’s a syrup (syrup of figs / wigs – gettit?)!

It’s very cruel to do this I know. And I have no idea whether other people do the same to me or anyone else. But it is an infinite source of entertainment.

Perhaps I have a brain which works in a slightly parallel dimension and I can see this where others can’t. Maybe I just have more imagination. When I have mentioned the likenesses to colleagues at first they are surprised, then amused and afterwards say they cannot think about that person without making the same comparison.

Something else I do is look at people and try to guess their professions. It is endlessly entertaining to sit on the tube (if you can get a seat) and work your way along the row of people sitting opposite and try to guess a) their name and b) their occupation. Many of them give their occupation away through their attire or their accoutrements (brief case, art folder, weird headscarf artfully tied in scruffy hair etc) but for some it’s really difficult and can take me almost an entire journey thinking through various options and selecting that which seems most likely or amuses me the most.

Guessing names is much harder. It used to be that if you were over 60 you were much more likely to be called Douglas, Frederick, Richard or something similarly old fashioned if you were a chap and something like Queenie, Emily, Violet or Freda if you were a woman. But all that has gone out of the window now, and many of the old fashioned names are coming back. There was a child at my daughter’s school called Stanley, and there is a Violet at my grand daughter’s nursery. Fancy names, courtesy of celebrities and fanciful parents, are also very likely and I have come across children called Summer and, poor kid, Seraphina.

I did for a time toy with naming my daughters Myvanwy (which, I discovered, is Welsh for Fanny) and Angharad, but in the end settled for Catherine Louisa and Suzanna Nancy (she hates the Nancy!). Nice, solid, old fashioned but not frumpy English names. So I indulge my imagination by naming my fellow tube passengers with the most outrageous name I think suits them.

It’s good fun – you ought to try it!