Being Jim Inconnu...

For the past five days I've been living a double life. In body I'm still Becca, but in mobile phone spirit, I'm known as Jim. Jim is a young Frenchman, blessed with at least two friends (Jessica and Kentin), and is a master of a mind-boggling species of French texting lingo. (If by a bizarre twist of fate you are reading this Jim, "CC Jim sa va alor koi 2 neuf?") What else can I tell you about Jim? Well, his mobile sim card gave up the ghost recently, perhaps as a result of carelessly letting his phone fall into a puddle. Several of his friends are probably still pacing their rooms urgently, trying to fathom the recent un-breaking of Jim's voice, his sudden alteration of accent, and his demonstration of a complete lack of knowledge of any of the weekend's complicated social plans laid by the means of intricate coded messages sent on Friday: "Kes ce ke tu fé?", "tu v vendredi soir", "sllt jimmy c mar jo comen vat u?". Ever since I read Daphne Du Maurier's The Scapegoat, in which an unsuspecting English traveller meets his French doppleganger (Let's add in a drop of German to spice things up further) and swaps his cold English life for that of a French aristocrat-with-a-chateau (don't be too jealous of him, there are of course Dark Secrets awaiting), I've been fascinated by the idea of swapping identities and by the possibilities of becoming someone else or of bumping into my exact likeness. Luckily, given that I'm female and English, Jim Inconnu is not my long-lost identical other, and rest assured I didn't attempt to steal his identity. Nevertheless finding myself looking through an inadvertantly opened window into someone else's life, as a result of the uniquely twenty-first century occurence of a phone company sending out two sim cards to the wrong addresses, reminds me of those more implausible situations. As if by magic, I had a new set of friends and a new phone number. After five days I started to become strangely attached to all these unknown people. Reality TV by mobile phone? Sadly, my window into someone else's world has closed now. A shame, as I'd very much like to know (as my Latin teacher used to say) the meaning of "C gus i fo" and "Alor ma geul y remarche". Answers accepted by text only.