The other day, I noticed I had been been contacted by a man called Giles on Facebook. He claimed that he and his friends had found my wallet at Reading festival in 2003, took £10 from it to buy cider and held an annual drinking competition – the Timothy Burrows Challenge – in my honour ever since. Reading was a rite of passage for post-GCSE/pre-university teens. I went regularly back then and did indeed lose my wallet at the festival.

Giles and friends had contacted many other Tim Burrows online to see if it was their wallet but with no luck, so it was most likely my wallet.

The first contact. Photograph: Tim Burrows

“It was handed into the lost and found, but not before one of them ‘burrowed’ a tenner out of it and bought as much White Lightning cider as he could find,” Giles wrote to me. “Sorry to inform you so many years later, I would happily restore karma by offering to pay the £10 back to its rightful owner.”

Tim at the Reading Festival, probably looking for his wallet Photograph: Will Mudie

I said not to worry about the tenner – I was just glad they put it to good use – and tweeted about it with a couple of screengrabs, expecting to make a few people laugh. But it went crazy, with 15,000 retweets in a little over a day. In the meantime, I gleaned more from Giles, including the rules – pretty much drink lots of strong cider – and tales about years of carnage in my name. He forwarded me a screengrab of his WhatsApp aflame with the excitement of finally finding the source of their ritual: “Tell him his name has become synonymous with heavy drinking. ‘I got totally Tim Burrowsed at the weekend’ or ‘I’m just off to the pub to see Timothy Burrows’.”

Incidentally, an inability to keep hold of wallets ran in the family – my sister once lost a wallet containing £50 at Glastonbury. It’s a story that could only come out of the UK, but it has since been told everywhere from the UK tabloid press to Korean radio. In the age of fake news, some have accused me of making the whole thing up for retweet glory, but I could have done with a quieter week. At times I have felt like a PA to my drunken 19-year-old self.

Social media means the past is no longer a foreign country – or, if it is, it’s one with a fiercely interventionist foreign policy. Even a wallet seemingly lost forever, both IRL and in the mists of memory, has the potential to make its way back to you, years after you got sick of Green Day and dodging bottles of piss. But I’m still honoured to have inspired this annual ritual, however fecklessly. It’s just a pity I don’t much like cider.