292 kanji variations, 137 in French, 102 in German, 64 in Arabic, 48 in Spanish and 12 in Urdu, all of which I'll plug into my translation software later. This leaves six potentials, two responding with cautious interest and the rest with abject confusion. I forward them all on to Vuyo, who is my catcherman. If people would just read the damn email properly, they would have responded to him directly.

And then there's an anomaly that chokes my auto-filter. Two stark sentences that read as either nonsense or poetry, or both.

When you eat, you are eating things from planes. The plastic forks, they leave a mark on you.

There is no link. No return address. No point to the message at all. It makes me nervous.

There is also an email from the dentist, a friendly reminder that it's time for my six-month check-up, please contact Ms Pillay to make an appointment. I haven't been to a dentist since I went to jail three and a half years ago. This is code for "contact me immediately", which is worrying because I'm not due to report in until next week. I log in to Skype chat where Vuyo is already online. Probably talking to "clients" in other windows.

››Vuyo: Yes?

He answers right away, curt as always. Vuyo is not his real name, of course. It's probably one of several not-hisreal-names that he uses in the course of business.

I like to think of him hanging out in a huge sprawling Internet café adjoining a raucous street market in Accra or Lagos, kinda like a 419 sweatshop, but the truth is he's probably in a dingy apartment like this one, maybe even right next door. Flying solo, because it's all carefully decentralised.

››Kahlo999: Hey, hello. How are you? Got a very strange msg. No return address. About forks. I'll fwd it.

››Vuyo: No! U dont know what it is girl. Might b a virus. Might b bad muti.