In case it sounds like she was just making demands on the fly, I should explain. 'Gil Jaysmith' isn't my birthname; I invented it, when I was around 20 years old, and I used it for pretty much everything except legal purposes until Sarah pointed out that it would be a pain in the ass for her to get married and become a Johnson-Smith and then have to change everything again to become Jaysmith. So I did the Deed Poll thing, and in early 2000, for I think exactly fifty quid, I obtained a document affirming that my legal name was now Gil Jaysmith.
But I was born Gil Johnson-Smith. It may have been my father's name but as a painter and decorator he went by George Smith to most people, giving me an unexpected early insight into how names really work. It's not just your name, you see, and on the far horizon of this argument, it's not your name at all; it's a combination of what your parents called you and how other people parse it. Accepting your name means accepting your history, and accepting that how it sounds to you and how it sounds to other people are entirely different things, and often bowing to the opinions of others. Johnson-Smith, you see, was not a good populist name for a house-painter and interior decorator (although don't read too much into that label; in the 1970s it just meant "also knows how to put up wallpaper"). So my father went by Smith. His ads in the local paper were emblazoned "G J S", mind you, but that all-important hyphen was missing. My mother claimed to me, on more than one occasion, that when they had set up their joint bank account, the bank manager ("the bank manager"... you can tell this story dates from the 50s) had asked them whether "Johnson Smith" was hyphenated, and she told him "Only if you have enough ink". My mother, the joker. She still hasn't given me a clear answer on why some coats button up on the right and others on the left, either.
At age ten, I got an Assisted Place at Exeter School. Assisted Places, long gone I expect, were a government way to enable access for poor families to elite higher education, like scholarships but funded by the local council rather than by the school itself. At Exeter School a double-barrelled name was nothing special; Damien Gardner-Thorpe was one fellow pupil. At a boys' school like that, your surname is your only name for seven years, even with plenty of your friends: Adams (Chris), Woodhouse (Anthony and Andrew), Griffiths (Tim). It's one reason why I sometimes default to using someone's surname; some people don't like it (Kim) and others just frown, wondering why I wouldn't use their first name when I know it. Yes, but there might be more than one of you in the room...
(I was unusual that I didn't have a middle name. Neither my sister, the equally tersely-named Jan - and no, neither Jan nor Gil are short for anything, they're just short - nor I have any extra names to put out there. I don't know why. It's possibly because we don't have a huge extended family... in fact, with the number of deaths we have, my family is now wackily small, just my mother, my sister, and three cousins left that I know of - plus maybe some second cousins and whatever, but my father rejected his entire Northern family as soon as he could and moved to London. Presumably this meant fewer people to please; I didn't find out that middle names are a tool for pleasing and placating relatives until only a few years ago. I thought they were just a backup plan in case you decided you liked the name 'John' so much that you gave it to all three of your songs, or whatever. In Ireland, you may not know this, but everyone has to please the Holy Mother, so all kids, even the boys, get 'Mary' as a middle name. Stupid fucking notion if you ask me, although I realize that's a cheap and safe shot, as the Virgin Mary is not known for throwing thunderbolts.)
Anyway, for my teenage years, Johnson-Smith was perforce my name. You haven't lived until you've been carrying something heavy for a teacher, you drop it, and he rounds on you with the announcement: "You prat, Johnson-Smith!" It's living the Harry Potter dream; J.K. Rowling is just continuing the long tradition of English school stories, which for girls include the epic Chalet School series and for boys could be said to have started with Kipling's fucking awesome "Stalky and co." Your first name is for your mother to use, and your siblings perhaps, but not for MEN; MEN use their surnames, just like they do at work ("Good work, Rice-Jones!") and as YOUNG MEN you will be trained to respond to your surname, your true name, your family name. Yes sir, no sir, three bags full sir.
It wasn't until I went to university that I followed the audacious strategy of shortening that family name. At university, you see, there are Hippies, Foreigners, and other nefarious types, including GIRLS, who don't play by the rules, and who use first names, or who have such epic names, sometimes written in funny directions, that the regal-sounding "Johnson-Smith" suddenly seems tremendously out of touch. Insufficiently 'street', mate. A bit snooty if you ask me. What the fuck's up with that hyphen, squire, too much ink in the pen? Breezed in here on four A's from a private school did we? (Although as it happens I can cheerfully report that my academic prowess took a distinct hit as I passed age 16, and I ended up getting three Bs and a C for my A-levels. Probably something to do with glandular fever and writing computer games when I should've been studying.) So I invented 'Jaysmith' as a shorter version, not with any great credo in mind, simply as camouflage. It's not like I'm actually upper-class; in fact if you look at my family's income, they barely earned enough money to pay tax since the year before I was born. But they had been high-earners in the 1950s, and in England everyone desperately wanted to look higher-class than they were, because that's where the money was, stupid; in being accepted, in escaping whatever shit you were born in. In running away from your Northern family and learning how to speak Received Pronunciation, BBC English, rather than sounding like a stupid Geordie who knows the words to "When The Boat Comes In". In watching the BBC rather than ITV, because ITV is for people who live in council houses. (The imported scifi shows I missed because of this rule... sigh.) In pleasing authority, because authority is watching your life and your career with interest.
Undercover as Gil Jaysmith, I watched the peasants and peons and the politically-informed and the drunks and the well-read and the honest and the weird with interest, and slowly became them; it's what your college life is supposed to do, to make you into a better human being. But it wasn't until I filled out a random survey about 'attitudes to your name' that it all fell into place.
Your name is what other people call you. It's what you call yourself. It's your identity; using the maths meaning of that word, it is the same as you. How would you respond if you had a different name? What would you change your name to, if you could? How would you react if people called you by a different name?
Jan had already experimented with this, actually, in her mildly rebellious teenage years. She announced to the world - in our house - that from this point on she would be known as Laura. She signed her stories by that name, she persuaded some of her friends to start using the name, and then she fell down a slope and injured her foot and my father called her Laura Limping for a week and that pretty much destroyed the credibility of 'Laura'. Looking back on that, I guess I shouldn't be surprised that he took the official change to 'Jaysmith' a bit badly, but by that point he was dying and I wasn't talking to them enough so I never really knew. Kids, always make sure there's a responsible adult in the room before trying this shit.
As for how you would react if people called you by a different name, everyone knows this already, but no-one admits to the pain. It's what happens in the playground, for starters; there are websites which will suggest the playground names your kid will endure, given the name you type in. In adult life, until recently, it was also entirely up to the environment you entered, and not you. "Oh, we already have two Junes here, we'll call you Junie," they told my mother in school. In the office, she was Miss Foy. To my father she was "Trot!" because of the sound of her heels. Who knows what else she was called? She does. And could you correct what people called you, back then, if you were a woman? Perhaps not as easily as you can now. It's verbal bullying, plain and simple; it's the imposition of another's reality on your own, and it hurts. "Political correctness gone mad" has for the most part enabled a world where you're asked what your name is, and how you would like to be called, and this is respected.
(Really, I've never seen a situation of political correctness genuinely "gone mad". Arguably the only real case of it was when Caligula appointed his horse as a Consul, and that was a long time ago, and he only did it the once.)
And yet, name-fuckery still happens. One of the main practical reasons you'd want to change your name from "Gil Johnson-Smith" is that anyone asking for your surname, and told "Johnson-Smith", will parse it as "first name Johnson, yes, thank you, stupid, I just asked for your surname, which is Smith, great" - writes down Smith. So now, very fucking helpfully, they write first name JAY last name Smith, unless we take the cunning method Sarah stole from Sarah Agarwal at work and spell the surname (pausing after the 'm' for added certainty). Well, that solved everything then.
For a long time, and almost entirely in England I have to say, I had the hassle of explaining that 'Gil' only had one 'l', and that no, just because someone else had written it with two 'l's, that didn't mean I was female. They've gotten that straight much quicker in Canada, presumably because the more multicultural your population, the more carefully you're encouraged to listen to and respect people's names. Suggestive, certainly, considering how culturally linear England was for so long, and how repressed so many of us turn out to be. (England has a long history of nodding politely at foreign names and pronouncing them as it pleases. It wasn't long ago that I found out that 'Genevieve' isn't pronounced 'Jen-Eh-Veave'. Although, I did meet a Niamh in primary school, and I bet most of you don't know how to pronounce that. I can only imagine the levels of reverse-schadenfreude - "Oh, you think YOU had problems?" - in any article she, or a dozen friends I know now, might write in response to this...)
What would you call yourself, if you could cut the apron strings? If you looked at the name your parents had chosen for you, and at the surname which history had slowly formed from the profession your male ancestors followed centuries ago? If you threw it off as a slave name, and created your own future? If your name reflected who you are, and not a sound your parents happened to like, or a fat and ugly relative who had paid for the trousseau? How does it feel to be called after an actress who made a popular movie that year, or named as a joke, or by parents on drugs? If your name is stupid, are you stupid?
What happened to Gil Johnson-Smith at the moment he changed his name, and when was that moment? When he started his own journey, when he first thought of that name, when he signed the deed poll... or when he effectively abandoned that name too, and started going by 'Panda'? Is it only real once you break away from it? Is Gil Johnson-Smith only alive in the minds of people I knew at primary and secondary school? I wonder how many people haven't been able to track me down because of that little jink.
There are so many battles we win just by waiting. At age 41 I'm Gil Jaysmith, legally and to basically everyone who knows me, and I don't have to sit and wince in silence if someone screws it up. But I still do, and sometimes I don't correct them, because yes, the whole point is that you have the right to be called what you want... but now I've accessed the cheeky karmic attitude that if they screw it up despite being told, it's their problem. Or so I tell myself. But really it's still me wincing inside, twenty-five years down the line from being bullied and renamed and relabelled, from being an Assisted Place pupil, from raising my head out of the gutter and daring to sit with the rich folks' kids. ("How many cars do you have in your family, Johnson-Smith?" "None, sir.")
Happily, I only really think about this shit when I'm writing a philosophical preamble to the real news of the day, which is that on Saturday March 26th 2011, we went to San Diego Zoo and I finally saw real live pandas, not in theory, not in pictures, not on a webcam, but right there twenty-five feet in front of me. And it was a wonderful, wonderful moment. Of course, in a shock development, the bigger of the two pandas in their enclosure was asleep. The smaller was padding around in the heat, occasionally standing in the shallow pool. Pacing is a negative behaviour for pandas, so I hoped that he was just circling the enclosure to cool off, rather than because he was unhappy. But later on we went past on the tour bus and the two of them were cheerfully chomping on enough bamboo to... well, to shut a panda up for a few minutes anyway, before you have to get him more.
I still get called 'Gill' at work, sometimes. Or, lately, a couple of people have concluded that my first name is Jay, maybe because there's someone else at work whose first name is Jay. But, through constant references to pandas and through signing myself this way in numerous emails, I have slowly persuaded some if not all of them to acknowledge my Panda label - or is it my Panda essence? I don't know, because although I call myself Panda, and Sarah usually calls me Panda, and everyone around me has indulged and endorsed this behaviour for a long time now... c'mon, I'm not an actual panda, am I? Notwithstanding my perfect emulation of their lifestyle - "eat for fourteen hours straight and sleep the rest away" as the famous song goes. I'm just another human male, known to the grid by various long numerical ids according to what skill sets or facilities I'm trying to access at that time. But if you believe in spiritual essences, maybe I really am a panda, and so I have the right name, after all this time. Of course, I'm just as trapped by the name 'Panda' as I would be by any other name. To break away from it, I would have to make an impressive effort. But for the most part, I like being Panda. It suggests large, cute, fluffy, and endangered, while also authorizing the claws which many people don't know about.
And I'm okay with that, for now.
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