Meet Paul St George, a crazy but rather lovely man I met at my London club:

Paul is obviously an expert storyteller. We were accidentally sharing a table one lunchtime and he started telling me about his tunnel: a rather big one that he ‘inherited’ from his great grandfather. And when I say big, I mean a tunnel that stretches most of the way between America and the UK.

Paul has a rather fabulous plan about what to do with his tunnel once he’s completed it. He’s says he’s finally going to build his great grandfather’s invention called ‘The Telectroscope’ which is, as far as I can tell, a mythical steam-punky machine for looking down big tunnels and seeing the people and places at the other end, just if they were standing right in front of you.

I love his tall – or rather ‘deep’ – story (see this LiveJournal post, for example), and something about the way he tells it makes me long for it to be true.

But here’s the April Fool bit: Paul actually reckons he’s going to build and deliver this whole thing – the tunnel, the Telectroscope, everything:

“I’ve made all these connections. Money couldn’t buy what I’ve managed to do. All the right people. Pretty soon I’ll be able to complete this tunnel and install the Telectroscope that my great grandfather invented and people are going to be able to see from London to New York.”

He says it very earnestly to me. So earnestly that I write it down. He makes me wish I could be so earnest and elevated about my own work, not stuck in my own little underground tunnel. Perhaps this project is a way for me to dig my way out, connect to something bigger and brighter…

Within hours of meeting Paul I received an email from him:

Hi Tim,

I left without paying for the coffees, sorry. When I went to the loo I left my sketch book on the table. Forgive me for being suspicious, but I wonder if you may have been tempted to look through it. If you were hopin g for any kind of drawing or plan or visual evidence to prove the veracity of my plan, you only needed to ask (see attached):

So what do we think? Is this real? Will he finish his tunnel by May? Will we get to see London from New York – and vice versa?