Who's Who?

If you think you lead a hectic life, you should see mine: “David Watson, 49, was grabbed by members of a Warner Robins police special response tactical team who swept in when he was distracted by a robot deployed inside his home.”

This from the Macon Telegraph in Georgia, US. And it doesn’t stop there –

I’m in trouble all over the place: in Florida for having insufficient permits for my wallaby, in Norwich for murdering Paul Cavanagh, and back in the US for “failure to obey an order or regulation, damage, destruction or wilful disposition of military property and wrongful use of amphetamine”.

My busy life of crime however, is a side-show. I've built a multi-faceted career, as a barrister in Liverpool, executive director of the Massachusetts Bicycle Coalition, head of trade at Pfizer, superintendent at Napoleon Area Schools and head of Hortapharm, an Amsterdam-based company licensed for research and development of cannabis for pharmaceutical use.

In the academic field I’m professor of psychology at the University of Iowa and professor of education at the Institute of Education (in which role I've been knighted). Keen to keep my hand in, however, I’m soliciting essays for a volume that aims to contribute to a consideration of the politics and aesthetics of transnationalism, and collecting dream-recall reports from 193 undergraduate students.

In my limited spare time I play rugby in New South Wales, table tennis in New Zealand and cricket in England.

I try to keep up in the arts too – I’ve translated Simenon’s The Hotel Majestic, penned a book called Fear No Evil, and written software which will produce 200 different versions of an article in 14 seconds. Musically I've gone for broke, with critics describing my work on highland bagpipes as the first major furtherance of Yoshi Wada's concept of psychedelic bagpipe minimalism.

I should never have googled my name, but with our government hell bent on compulsory ID cards, I thought I’d better find out about some of the people I’ll eventually be confused with.

ID cards will switch our relationship with government through 180 degrees – instead of reporting to us, they will force us to report to them, ending a democratising process begun in 1258 with the Provisions of Oxford imposed on Henry III. This issue is only simmering at present (visit www.no2id.net) but it will, I hope, become a major problem for our leaders.

Sadly, I will not be available to man the barricades, since, as it happens, I died recently having been decapitated by a dolphin in Florida. The beast was reported to be making “funny noises” shortly before the attack, presumably as it checked through its address book to make sure it had the right bloke.