What's in a name?

It’s a terrible thing to be a painfully shy child and have a name like ‘Noldy’. People say ‘What?’, or if they’re polite, ‘I beg your pardon?’, and then you have to speak to them twice. Whereas, if my name had been Elizabeth, or Jane, I could have said it once, got it over with, and been forgotten, able to blend into the background, which is where I felt comfortable.

Of course, the full horror of the entire name is even worse. It’s Arnoldina. ‘Did your parents want a boy?’. ‘Was your father’s name Arnold?’ No, and no. I was named after my Dutch grandmother, who was delighted, poor thing. My children know full well they never have to name anything after me.

Why couldn’t my parents have honoured my Austrian grandmother?– she was Antonia.

My maiden name was Haidlinger. Make no mistake, I liked being a Haidlinger, and still consider myself one. But ponder the effect of this immoderate nomenclature when I went to school.

Every day, in the first year, we had to write our names down. And there I was, laboriously printing A-r-n-o-l-d-i-n-a H-a-i-d-l-i-n-g-e-r, when everyone else had already moved on to the next lesson.

Parents, consider your children. Consider their futures. I’m not just thinking of the obvious ‘Miles Long’, or ‘North West’ (Kanye West’s daughter), or even the really peculiar ‘Harper Seven’, the youngest Beckham child, name chosen by her siblings. Celebrities don’t count. Their IQ seems to diminish in direct proportion to increase of income and exposure.

But I know a perfectly normal family who called their little girl ‘Bilbo’.

Yes, there was a time when it was fashionable to name your children after characters in the “Lord of the Rings’. And this was long before the films appeared, so at least we know the parents were readers. I know a man called ‘Strider’. Well, okay, I could probably survive, were I a man, going through life being called Strider.

But Bilbo is a Hobbit. A brave and good Hobbit, to be sure, but a male Hobbit.

Aikona, parents, be good to your children when naming them.

Sod this for a lark

Technology! Wonderful thing, technology. When it works. And when the power is on.

Oh yes, I remember it well, in the old days, when I worked in the libraries – when we still had dumb terminals, and multiplexers, and a myriad of things that could go wrong.

The phone calls – ‘My screen doesn’t work!’.

‘Is the plug plugged in at the wall?’

‘I don’t know! Oh, yes it is… but the screen still doesn’t work.’

‘Is the plug switched on?’

‘Yes…no…there, you fixed it!’

‘My corpus is frozen!’ Lucky corpus, it’s as hot as hell here…

‘So’ – attempt at humour – ‘it’s a case of non habeas corpus?’

‘Huh?’

Corpus delicti…

I swore I would never, ever have one of those damned machines in my home.

Then I retired (and that’s another story)

And I got one. A nice big, clunky desktop (laptops were still viewed with a degree of suspicion in those days, how would all the necessary fit  into such a small space, it must be a scam…)

A nice whirring tower, a monitor with a back like a camel, and a keyboard that took up acres of desk. I surrounded it with crystals and other propitiatory offerings, and embraked on my internet life.

Of course it was only supposed to be for email, so I could keep in touch with my sons. Well, that was a loser from the start – neither of my sons are writers. They may phone from time to time, but sending fun-filled and informative emails is just not going to happen, ever.

So I was forced, yes forced, to explore other avenues of computorial satisfaction, and made the acquaintance of google. Google is a dangerous instrument for a librarian. Worse than a dictionary. You start off with innocently looking up one thing, and three hours later, you end up miles and worlds away from the original query, which is by then forgotten anyway, so at some later stage you have to look it up again.

Just follow the instructions

That’s what they all say.

‘You can’t miss it’, they say. Which means I will be driving around for at least an hour, looking for a green house, which turns out to be blue, because ‘they’ are slightly colour-blind.

It’s a bit like buying a new, highly advanced washing machine, after you’ve used a twin-tub which was so old it ran along the floor from all the rattling. Along comes this gleaming, complicated monster, with at least 17 buttons, which are covered in smooth plastic, so it doesn’t feel as though you’ve pressed anything at all. (And they are so sensitive that when a cat walks over them, the machine switches off, and you think – OMG what have I done????)

Anyway, the clever machine comes along, is installed, and at 10.30 at night you are ready to begin your first brand – new, sparkly, whiter than white, wash. And you look for the instructions. All those buttons to choose from.

There are no instructions. Zilch.Nothing. Except for a delivery slip, which doesn’t count. Thank god for fuzzy logic.

At least my rattly twintub offered exhaustive instructions, notions, suggestions, superbly presented in Japanese English. Right down to pointing out the ‘Usefull (sic) pocket”, for which nobody ever found any use at all.

Anyway, the point of this is to find out how this blogging really works, in its most basic form. No, I haven’t spent any dollars on it, I’ll wait until the exchange rate comes down from deep space.

Cats

I have six cats. They stroll in and out of the house all day long, unless they’re coming in through the window, in which case it’s more of a plummet than a stroll. Occasionally they even come to say hello to me, or have a quick kiss or stroking session.

It’s not as though I hardly see them.

Then why do I feel the need to inflict rhapsodies (with a large side order of endearments) upon them every time I see one of the dear creatures?

Am I alone in this? If not, it’s no wonder they look at us and think, ‘You’re funny. And not in a good way.’