"My names are Legion . . ."

I’ve lost count of the names that I’ve had.

Of course, there aren’t too many people who get through their lives with just one name. You get the name on your birth certificate, and almost immediately your family will start using a variation of this. When you go to school you’ll probably get stuck with a nick-name or two; you may even like some of these. As a working adult, you can pick up new, exciting names. Again, some will be bearable (Guv’nor, Chef, M’lud etc.) but others won’t (Insert unpleasant rude name of your choice here). If you get married you may take a new name, your spouse may call you something special, and your children will call you something else as well. If you become an author you may take a nom de plume, and if you become an actor, stage names are the norm rather than the exception.

These days, it’s even easier to acquire aliases, especially if you have any kind of internet presence. Every new software registration, blog or forum seems to need a login name, and if you participate in on-line gaming, you have to come up with something appropriate and unique for every new character that you create.

Having alternative names is often useful, occasionally annoying and sometimes impossible to avoid.

So why do most people know me as Kim, whilst my newsagent calls me Chris?

When I was born, there was a lot of difficulty settling on a name. I was the third of three brothers, so my parents had already used up their top choices. My mother really liked ‘Kim’. I never found out why, but like to think it was after Kipling’s hero. To my mother’s dismay, there was resistance to this name from her family, so my parents decided that even if that name didn’t go on my birth certificate, it would be my name within the family. To justify this deceit, they hit on the plan of making my initials spell it. Our family name begins with ‘M’, so that was fine and everyone liked Ian as a middle name, so the ’I’ was sorted.

Then it all went wonky.

Nobody liked any of the other names beginning with ’K’.

In the 1950’s, the sources of inspiration were limited, so I don’t think they got much past Kenneth, Kevin and Keith before they started looking at names starting with ‘C’.

So that’s how I ended up being named ‘Christopher’. I suppose it would have been more honest to have named me ‘Compromise’, now I think about it.

Twenty odd years a go, I worked at a shop up the road from the newsagents. When I started work there, I failed to explain that I never normally answered to my official name, and so for the entire seven years that I worked there, I was called Chris by everyone at the shop, all our customers and anyone who we knew in the neighbourhood.

That’s why the newsagent calls me Chris.

A similar thing happened when I spent nine months on industrial placement at ICL, so when I started work at Jodrell Bank, I ensured that I was called Kim from my first day there and I’m very glad that I did.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with the name ‘Chris’, it’s just that I never feel like it’s actually a part of me; it’s as if I’m wearing it, but it just doesn’t quite fit properly.

And if you want to know what I was known as at GKN, when I was driving a Transit van and delivering industrial fastenings for a living, please feel free to try and guess. You’ll have to ply me with copious amounts of strong drink before I’ll willingly reveal that one.