The other Fiona McCann

My mother accused me the other day of having a blog. I mean accused me in that passive aggressive “I’m just inquiring” kind of way mothers have, that makes it clear straight off that there’s more than just inquiring on the line here. My mam was basically upset because I hadn’t told her about said blog, so that she could print it out for her scrap book (my mother has been collecting clippings of my work since I first put pen to paper). Keen to uncover all my shady cyber secrets, my increasingly internet-savvy mam finally got around to googling me and came up with Fiona McCann’s blog. But not mine. As it transpires, there’s another Fiona McCann, who lives in another corner of cyber space and is wandering through the net world, and most likely other worlds too, under my name. Alarming, and even more so because it’s not just my mam that keeps coming up with her. Everybody who googles my name (our name) gets her, before finally happening on me somewhere into the fourth or fifth page (perseverance pays, my friends). OK, I know this isn’t exactly outrageous alien-invasion level oddness, but it’s still enough to spark at least my curiosity. So I went to Fiona McCann’s blog, and wrote to her. Or me.

Dear Fiona McCann,
My name is Fiona McCann, and every time somebody googles me, they end up on your site and I go through the whole rigmarole of explaining that I am not you, or you are not me. Today, I googled myself, and once again, it led to you. In a moment of existential uncertainty, I thought it best to write and confirm that we are not, in fact the same person.
Regards,
Fiona McCann


And the delightful Fiona McCann (I knew she would be), put my comment up on her site and wrote this:

“I plan to definitely email this Fiona McCann immediately and ask her some pertinent questions about her life and if I like what I hear, I will offer to exchange identities with her so that people looking for her who end up here will be in the right place.”

A lively exchange between two (or was it just the one all along?) Fiona McCanns ensued, as you’d expect really, where we made it clear that neither of us were porn stars or water polo players (for more of this: Fiona McCann ).

I know all this has been done before, a la Dave Gorman, but not by me, and now I sort of get it. There’s something kind of cool to find someone else wandering around living a whole other life under your personal alias. So bualadh bos to Fiona McCann. Now we just need to find the porn star and the water polo player, and we can take over the world.