So, you want to know about my little adventure with Simon Davies Wales. Right, let me tell you, it wasn’t some grand research project or anything fancy. It all kicked off in a pretty ordinary way, but boy, did it turn into a thing.
I was clearing out my shed a few months back, you know, the kind of job you put off for ages. And there it was, an old, battered notebook that belonged to my dad. He wasn’t one for writing much, so finding this was a bit of a surprise. Most of it was just scribbles, old phone numbers, stuff like that. But then, tucked in the back, there was this one page with a name: ‘Simon Davies – Wales contact?’ That was it. No other details. Just that.
Now, my dad, he had mates all over, from his time in the army, old work buddies. So, I got curious. Who was this Simon Davies from Wales? Was he an old friend? Someone dad owed a tenner to? My mind started racing a bit. I thought, ‘Okay, I’ve got a bit of time, let’s see if I can track this person down.’ That was my ‘practice’ for the week, if you like. A bit of amateur sleuthing.
Well, let me tell you, that was a mistake. A huge mistake. I fired up the computer, typed in ‘Simon Davies Wales’. And what did I get? Chaos. Absolute, unadulterated chaos. It was like opening a floodgate. There must be thousands of Simon Davieses in Wales, or connected to Wales. Seriously. Simon Davies the rugby player – there are a few of those, by the way. Simon Davies the artist. Simon Davies the shop owner in some village I can’t even pronounce. Simon Davies who climbed a mountain. It was a mess, a complete digital haystack and I was looking for one specific needle, without even knowing what the needle looked like!
The search engines? Useless. They just throw everything at you. Social media? Even worse. A million profiles, half of them probably dormant for years. I spent hours, then days, clicking through pages, trying to find some connection, some tiny clue that might link back to my dad’s era. It was like wading through treacle. Thick, sticky, digital treacle.
You start to wonder about these things, don’t you? We’ve got all this technology, all this information at our fingertips, but when it comes to something simple, like finding a person based on a vague note from decades ago, it’s almost impossible. It’s all just noise. Loads of data, sure, but no real wisdom, if you catch my drift. It’s like everyone’s shouting online, but no one’s actually saying anything useful for a search like mine.
Why am I telling you all this? Because that little note, that ‘Simon Davies Wales’ scribble, it ended up consuming so much of my energy. I got obsessed. I was up late at night, peering at the screen, chasing down leads that went nowhere. My wife started asking if I was having an affair with the internet. And for what? I still had a pile of actual important stuff to do, but I was stuck on this wild goose chase.
In the end, I found nothing. Absolutely zilch. Not a single clue that felt right. The Simon Davies from Wales on my dad’s note is still a ghost. Maybe he was just a name dad jotted down and forgot about. Who knows? But the ‘practice’ of looking? That taught me a lesson. It taught me that sometimes, some mysteries are best left unsolved, and that the internet isn’t the magic wand we sometimes think it is. It’s often just a bigger, more confusing shed full of other people’s junk.
