One of the strangest and, in a weird way, best things to have happened to me in the past year was the emergence of a firm conviction among a quite large collection of internet weirdos that I spent my youth fighting for an elite unit of the Israeli army. It started after a boozy pre-Christmas lunch almost exactly a year ago, when a woman tweeted me. I vaguely recalled that she had tweeted me before, probably about Jews or bankers or Palestine or Dolphin Square or Jimmy Savile, all of which I get quite a lot and normally ignore. This time, though, she had a question. She wanted to know about my Twitter profile picture, and whether the olive-green shirt I’m wearing in it was my uniform from my time in the IDF.
This amused me. In that photograph, which was shot for a gadget column, I am also holding an iPhone to my head, as though it were a pistol. Nobody had ever mentioned the shirt before. ‘It’s from Topman,’ I told her, because it was.
The woman replied with a smiley face. Then she asked if I’d been in the IDF anyway, though. And I suppose, for what happened next, I have only myself to blame.
@hugorifkind
I could have just said ‘no’ but it had been a boozy lunch and I didn’t have much work on. So I started taking the piss. First, I asked her if she had been in the IDF anyway, though. This, she interpreted as wriggling, so she broadened her question to include Mossad. ‘Because that might be why I bought the shirt from Topman, you mean?’ I replied, but by now she felt Topman was a smokescreen. So I asked her if she imagined I’d done all this before I had my first job, which was on a celebrity news website writing about people like Kylie Minogue, or perhaps afterwards.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in