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Name Horror
Mavis Cheek is unhappy with an important aspect of herself...
"Is that your real name", is one of the commonest questions put to me on my professional journey round this sceptred isle. So while it was heartening, from a writers point of view, to find Shakespeare topping the charts as Man of the Millennium, I have to say in defence of personal knowledge, that he did occasionally get things wrong, and one of the things he got profoundly wrong, was suggesting, that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.
Foreigners may say that to the alien ear, it sounds lilting and poetical, but you and I know that at the name 'Mavis', most people will be stuffing hankies in their laughing mouths, and enjoying mental pictures of a plump woman in a pinny, with a scrubbing brush, probably from Bolton. Sorry Bolton, but you have the problem too. Bolton is the Mavis of place names.
But are we bearer of our own destiny or not? I know I am, because unlike poor Bolton which had the grace to stay single, came the day when I fell in love and got married, and in one fell swoop, I went from not one laughable appendage, but two. "To be called 'Mavis'" as Lady Bracknell might say, "is a misfortune," but to marry someone called 'Cheek' is, in Wildean terms, "irredeemably careless."
There cannot be many of you out there with a name as risible as mine. I defy you. I set down the challenge.
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