How an email mixup led to me befriending my namesake – and a glimpse of a wholesome second life

A message meant for another Dale, sent by his 88-year-old sister, revealed the fascinating world of like-named people

For a while now, I have been getting the strangest emails. They concern golf rules, carpenter bees and CPR short courses I’ve not signed up for at local fire departments I could not place. I have been on the receiving end of a round-robin addressed “to all the stoners”.

The explanation is that I share my name – and therefore a similar email address – with a stranger half way round the world from me. Random email is the bane of everyone’s existence; I could tell you how many actual thousands of unread messages I have, but no one needs more pain. What does alleviate it, though, is any inkling that a real person may be present – and there is something fascinating about discovering people who share our name, as though we are connected by something more than pure coincidence.
Last autumn, 178 Hirokazu Tanakas scratched that particular itch, displacing the Martha Stewarts of the world in breaking the Guinness world record for the number of like-named people in one room. They had gathered in a Tokyo cinema at the behest of their founding Hiro, nicknamed Semi-Leader, a baseball fan with a good sense of humour. He was inspired to find others with the same name after stumbling across a mention of another Hirokazu Tanaka, and experiencing a feeling of “thunderous joy”.

Sometimes I reply to the misdirected emails, especially when important notices – invoices, records from business service divisions, shipping contracts, medical appointments – show up. The other day it was an email strap-lined “Sad News”, to tell not-me that someone had died. “I’m not the Dale Berning you think I am,” I’ll say, always kindly. An Urma once shot back: “But didn’t we speak this morning?” She wanted to fill me in on the carrier Ts and Cs for two vehicles going west, to California. I had to explain that I live in London.

A year before lockdown, I got a masterly cold open. “I have Dale Berning Sawa in my address book,” it started. “Is that something I should toss?” It was from a woman I’ll call Joni. She said she’d been cleaning pollen out of her roof gutters and that they were closing floodgates because of all the rain. She had almost forgotten her birthday dinner, to which, she said, someone called Bob had asked that she bring “the insect collection”. She mentioned someone called Adam having once eaten fire-roasted grubs. And she signed off with a line you know I’ll treasure for ever: “Lots of love and stay dry,” she said. “Have you checked your bridge lately?”

I wrote back to Joni. “I’m writing a novel about a little girl who collects dead bees,” I said. I needed to know about those insects. I wanted to know about that bridge. Joni – the other Dale’s big sister – is now 88 years old. Dale is 83.

The reason I’ve been getting his mail all this time is that I chose my email address before I got married and added the Sawa to my surname. And because “daleberning” was taken, Dale added his middle initial to his, a detail secretaries and correspondents frequently omit.
Going by my more famous namesakes (Dale Watson, Dale Winton, Dale Denton!) and my professional experience, Dales are mostly men. The people who cold call me in office settings clearly think so too. Postal invitations are invariably addressed to a Mr me.

Joni and the other Dale are happy for me to write about them, if slightly mystified as to why I’d want to. “Today, I plan on cutting the grass and doing some plant trimming,” Joni said when I asked her. “Who would want to read about that?”

The answer, I suppose, is that we all want connection, even in its most random, accidental forms. It’s why we shore up stories such as that of the Arizona woman who mistyped her grandson’s mobile number and invited a perfect stranger to Thanksgiving. He said yes, and seven years on, they’re still celebrating together.

Joni sent me a photo of her, Dale and her husband sat in a pub. Whenever I look at it, I smile as broadly as they do in that picture, three gorgeous oldies celebrating an 85th birthday under different skies, several hundred miles away.