The bugging spam jam

The true mark of a man is not the company but the spam he keeps, writes Dr Saumya Balsari.

I'm in a jam because of spam. I really am. There was a time when I used to find spiritual blessings in the mailbox from a gentle aunt from Caterham. Now I find spam. About eighty mails a day. A smug colleague smirks and informs me he gets three hundred and fifty. Aha! So, the true mark of a man is not the company, but the spam he keeps.

Yesterday, I found spam with the subject: 'Organic extend your member solution'. I was puzzled. Singly, the words have meaning. Take 'organic'. I love organic foods. They make me feel virtuous. 'Member'? Yes, we are members of society, family and clubs, that sort of thing. Extending membership of it? No problem, we'd like that. Likewise with 'solution'. The world badly needs one for Iraq. Then I read further (at this point, all those below eighteen - inches, not age - should avert their eyes:

'A recent survey displays that 41 % of ladies are discontented with their intimate partners. Of course most of these ladies would never narrate their mates that they are miserable.'

Don't you hate bad grammar and sloppy punctuation? The writer of the above passage evidently ate shoots and left school. Lynne Truss wouldn't have approved. That apart, this 'information' appears spurious. How were it obtained, and more importantly, who conducted the survey? Considering the 'ladies' would never tell their 'mates', where was the survey obtained? (I don't mean where as in Aberdeen). My eye falls on a command written in blue. It exhorts me to 'Condition this trouble'.

Again, I know what 'condition' means by itself. And as for trouble, life's full of it, and the nanny with the visa has had enough. Keen though I am to condition any trouble with organic solutions, if this were a form I was filling in, I would simply write 'Not applicable'. Clearly, spam is indiscriminate. Spam also learns quickly. This morning I found a revised mail that urged me to enlarge, extend and expand male or female bodily parts currently causing dissatisfaction. I still maintain that spam is indiscriminate.

Moving on. For some undoubtedly unjustifiable reason, the population of Nigeria sends me emails. Here's one today asking me to set up an agency for the import of cocoa and rubber into the United Kingdom. I'll get ten per cent, or so they say. I'm okay with ten, but when? I dare not click. A scam is even more of a scam when it is spam.

P.S. At 6.30 p.m. every Friday night, I get a text message from Bournemouth. It asks me if I'm going to party. Sorry, whoever you are out there - I'm too busy deleting spam.

(Saumya Balsari is the author of the comic novel 'The Cambridge Curry Club', and wrote a play for Kali Theatre Company's Futures last year. She has worked as a freelance journalist in London, and is currently writing a second novel.)