Oscar Wilde said that “life imitates art far more than art imitates life”. Well, if we can count a hypothetical scene from an American Pie movie as ‘art’ -and I demand that we can – then the following story yet again proves ol’ Wildey right.
Traditionally at Hallowe’en we are haunted by thoughts of otherworldly spirits coming to perturb us. At night, sitting alone in our houses, shadows seem to distort, the ticking clocks gain an ominous tone, the flicker of a light, the howl of the wind outside, set our minds racing. Our logical thought processes are shelved and our primeval, our childhood, brain takes over. We imagine monsters; demons; gruesome grotesques, lurking in every corner. What we do not expect to find is a naked, 29 year-old car-salesman by the name of Marc Campfield bunking down in our son’s bed. Yet, I think we can all agree, that this is a far more terrifying state of affairs than any monster our minds could conjure, and we would gladly come face to face with any ghoul over a naked, drunken car-salesman
Yet this is almost, to a tee, the exact situation that one mother found herself in on Sunday, and it is a staggeringly beautiful story.
Juliet Jarvis, was awoken at 4:30am by the sound of, what she presumed to be, her son Stewart returning home from a Halloween night out. She encountered him sort of burrowing into a bed in the spare room, and fetched him a pillow.
She describes that this man, who she still believed to be her son, was covered in quite a lot of mud, mostly naked and surprisingly polite in comparison to her son. She said that alarm bells first started ringing for her when, after handing him the pillow, he replied ‘Thank you’.
Now. This raises many questions about the relationship between Juliet and her 30 year-old son Stewart. So wearied is Juliet by Stewart’s usual ‘antics’, that upon finding what she imagined to be her son – covered in mud and attempting to form some sort of rudimentary fabric nest, like a large and drunk woodland animal – she simply accepts this state of affairs, helps him and is then astounded that he thanks her. Oh Stewart.
Yet, despite her suspicions, she still assumed that the man lying in her son’s bed, was her son, and more power to her. Even Sherlock Holmes would be hard pressed to deny that that was a logical deduction to make in the situation.
However, both Juliet Jarvis, and in this instance this fictive Sherlock Holmes, are very, very wrong. It was actually 29 year-old, car-salesman Marc Campfield. Marc had earlier in the night been ejected from a local club after falling asleep. While trying to make his way home, he ended up silently breaking into Ms. Jarvis’ home, some 4 miles away from his own house.
The fact that it was not actually her son came to light when her husband, Cliff said to her the following: “There is a naked bloke upstairs and it is not Stewart”. Now to unpack this for a second, it sounds as if Cliff is more perturbed at the fact that the naked man is not his step-son Stewart, more than the fact that there is a naked man upstairs at all.
Marc, tried to say that he was a friend of Stewart’s, however, he realised he’d been rumbled when Juliet insisted, in what must have been one of the most awkward photoshoots in history, in taking a picture of Marc to send to Stewart to see if he knew him. Marc confessed what had really happened and Juliet and Cliff, were benevolent enough to give this staggeringly hungover, naked man some of Stewart’s clothes and to drop him home.
Surely, this is one of the truly great tales of modern times.
