Some months ago I discovered that I lost my image.

Losing one's image might sound like a rather strange thing to do but it is a perfectly plausible event, especially today where most images inhabit the digital rather than physical realm. If it is true that the new frontiers of human freedom are to be found in digital technology this, unfortunately, applies to your face as well.
A couple of years ago I was asked by a friend of mine to take part in a photo shoot. She worked in an image bank and they were all busy cranking out this series of pictures to be targeted to the Japanese "study abroad in multicultural London kind of thing" market.
I had several perplexities concerning the whole thing (notwithstanding the image bank concept in itself), but after reassurances that the picture would end up in very far away Japan I decided to go for it. They offered me some cash to be the Mediterranean appendix of their heterogeneous bunch of fake students in a fake classroom and I gladly accepted.
The shoot ticked all the boxes neatly: Big Ben, the National Gallery, Multicultural Multiculture in London and so on. We even had a stint in Parliament Square where we were required to jump like frenzied monkeys whilst doing the Victory sign of Churchillian memory. It was truly catastrophic.
After that we went back to our fake classroom where we were left in the hands of our fake teacher, a toothy woman that had something rather sadistic to her. Anyway, I signed the disclaimer papers, got the money, left and completely forgot about the thing.

Unfortunately my image didn't forget about me.

In February I received a phone call from a friend in Milan enquiring about my presence on a 48 sheet billboard in front of her house.
The perverted rules of the global marketplace assured that the picture in question most certainly never arrived in Japan but instead landed in my birthplace in the form of a massive Trade Union campaign. I felt completely sick, not because of the Trade Union thing, I'm all up for that.
I felt sick because I was actually facing my image coming back (with a vengeance) from the digital realm to haunt me in a very tangible manner. It was one of the fine messes I'm specialized in getting in and I didn't even know to what extent my image (or my out of control image, I shall say) was going to smirk around.
I would have discovered it pretty quickly.
After one week my sister's boyfriend texted me that I looked pretty neat on a 6 by 3 mt in Florence.
If I had any doubts about the fact that the campaign might have been on a national scale a friend of mine delivered an uncompromising verdict from Venice a week later: I was buoyantly sailing around on some Vaporetti (small ferry boats, the venetian equivalent of a Routemaster).
The final blow was dealt in June.
For my birthday I received a honorary membership to the trade union, they thought it would have been kind since my image on the run (or ex-image, or image of myself on which I have no control whatsoever) is gracing some 4.427.037 individual membership cards.
In the Society of the Spectacle freedom [sic] comes at a price, in my case it was a rather cheap 100 pounds.

P.S.
A dark development: I discovered my aberrant image smirking incongruously behind a politician on his Flickr photostream...
Technically I could not display it because my image on the run, in a strange twist of fate repaired cowardly behind copyright law.
The photographer who took the shot posted it under an All Rights Reserved licence, bitter irony anyone?

   Smiling behind a politician..    Smiling on a membership card...    Smiling on some posters..    Floating around in Venice...