*waves*

Work today?
In line with the romantic climate, natch, translation of a whole range of skincare products for "the intimate area"...Yep, some people get all the luck.

Anyway, today is also D's birthday and in honour of him, a terrible romantic - well, he was born on Valentine's Day - and of the fact that I'm not and that I haven't got anything much to write about if snow doesn't float your boat, here is a thing (about him) I posted a couple of blip personas ago.

A name is a name is a name...

This is the song my dad played - non-stop - (once upon a time, it was possible to do that on old-fashioned record players), the morning he married my mother.

The reluctant groom (and god was he reluctant) had had hardly any say in proceedings, but he did get his say in one thing: my name. He named me after a young girl who had been important to him at the age of about 12, in a nice period of his life. A freckle-faced girl (he loves girls with freckles, my dad) he had adored and who had lived round the corner from him when his life was good, when he had lived in a big house, and his father hadn't disappeared to America to screw around with famous and soon-to-be-dead novelists, who would leave him their fortune (in debts to the IRS) and the family at the mercy of the scandal sheets for a while.

My dad is a romantic. My sister spent almost all of the permitted six weeks without a name because they wanted to find the right one. Originally the idea was to call her Holly but there were objections (his mother-in-law), plus the fact that another good friend had already "nicked" it for his daughter a couple of months beforehand. She was nearly Renée but everyone was frightened that she would end up as Renie - the accent would have fallen by the by in our corner of sunny Essex, you see. My dad did get his way in one thing, though: Melody is my sister's second name. Anyone familiar with The Stones will understand the reasoning for that and my dad is a passionate Stones fan. Always has been.

Then came my baby sister. She was going to be Corinne, which is her middle name. But no, my dad named her after an Allman Brothers' track and it suits her. Just listening to it brings to mind a little blonde tot dancing in the garden. That song is her. Sorry Mr Clarkson and all you Top Gear viewers: I hear that music and I see Jessie, small and blonde and dancing.

I got the short straw. It could so easily have been one of them, to get stuck with this name. But I was born first. I used to cringe with embarassment at the start of every school year whenever a new teacher was unable to read my name out correctly; this would be followed by a class-wide chorus of the correct pronunciation, minus one voice - mine. And then, of course, there is the perpetrator of this "crime": yes, he has called me "Doris," "Blackie" (I was in a goth phase), "Boris" (the spider) and even "Thing", plus a whole load of other names that have nothing to do with the one he so kindly bestowed on me in the eyes of the law.
So where do you go with a name that no one can read, no one can spell and which seems to be popular amongst the rugby playing fraternity of South Africa?

My dad's excuse, apart from the freckles and the cutesy girliness of his first love -- things which are worlds away from me -- is that people don't forget my name. He's right, they don't. They just get it wrong and they keep on doing it. I don't bother correcting the pronunciation or the spelling; I have never seen the point, it is a name like any other. Only it isn't, though, is it? It is my name. It sets me apart from many and binds me to a few.

So imagine my surprise when, messing about on F/Book, I found someone who shares it with me - a girl and not a beefy Afrikaner with a broken nose and cauliflower ears. She even comes from the my home town. A coincidence? Someone could have heard my name and liked it, but not so much as to have used the exact same spelling.

So I looked further and it turned out that I knew her dad, way back when. He was actually my first "serious" boyfriend. And of course, curiosity got the better of me, so I contacted him.

He graciously replied, said he hadn't forgotten me and when I mentioned his daughter, he had this to say:
"Yes, my eldest daughter is named after you. I remember that you told me your Dad named you after a special girl from his youth. I just carried that on."