On a name

The Boyfriend does not do mornings. He knows they exist of course and has to make some form of accommodation with them, especially on the days when he has to leave his flat. He has a complicated series of escalating alarms in place that mostly work. He makes up for it later, being almost unbearably perky at midnight. I am reliably informed that this lack of vim in the morning is to do with cortisol levels and blood pressure or some such. My settings are quite the reverse. I awake at dawn with exacting regularity even before the birds have got properly into their stride, which is more than a bit annoying at this latitude in summer and irritatingly does not make getting up in winter any easier. We are each of us for different reasons necessarily silent at breakfast. I like to commune with my first cup of tea of the day in peaceful reverie. Tea, you understand, for an Irish person has almost mystical properties and accordingly deserves a proper homage of a morning. So you may imagine my surprise when at a recent Sunday breakfast, the Boyfriend voluntarily opened a conversation with the information that he’d had a dreadful nightmare the previous night. I commiserated. He continued, “I dreamt that we had moved to Spain and were sitting at a table in the local café enjoying a drink, when you suddenly said that you had a secret you were keeping from me but you thought that it was now time to confess it.” “Oh, said I, “I am not so interesting, babe. You know all my secrets such as they are. What was the secret? Did I tell you?” “Yes,” said he, “…that you had a porn star name.” We both paused, me because I was unsure what was coming next and he probably for effect. “Well, what was it?” “Pavlova Nova,” said he. Silence, momentarily. “Oh,” said I, “…wait till I tell J,” and burst out laughing, upending my tea and affronting the Cat mid bath. How apt. I have a mean recipe for pavlova with tarragon and grapes so that when you cut the meringue open, it’s pale green inside and has a lovely hint of aniseed. Mind you, this did cause my New Zealand friends, J being one, to look askance for, as I later learned, pavlova is their national dessert and you mess with it at your peril. The Boyfriend was at pains to point out that it was just the name, and that he didn’t think I was secretly a porn star or anything. To be offended… or not offended? Hmmm.

Is a name ever just a name? A big question for early in the day and definitely not to be pondered at least before the second and possibly even a third cup of tea. Things come to life when named and to be saddled with the wrong one must chafe. I agonised over the naming of the Cat and in the end had to go with the first thing that popped into my head as the breeder was in a hurry to register her. I needn’t have fretted. I rarely use her name except to reinforce the rule about cats and tables, which always results in an argument and me having to get up from the sofa. The naming of each design also requires a deal of thought and then the colour ways must have their names too. It turns out that this is either ridiculously easy or frustratingly hard, and it’s not always obvious at the beginning of the design process which it will be. For the easy ones, the design itself suggests the name from its inspiration or its component parts or from the feeling it elicits. The difficult ones, now, are difficult, well I confess I don’t really know why. I have to walk away and let an idea or a thought come to me when it’s good and ready. When it does, it always seems to have been blindingly obvious. Yes, the subconscious mind is a wondrous thing. Once I hit on the idea of mainly naming the colour ways after food, all slotted into place. You see, I think about food a lot. Even now as I write I am also thinking about what I could eat with my morning coffee, which has been made more complicated as I have sworn off biscuits and cake… for the moment. Or at least during the week. Excluding Fridays. I can report that I have never been in need of a porn star name, but should that situation ever arise, well… it’s perfect for me.