What’s in a name? Some are too normal for their own good: Tom, Will, Harry. Others are markers of a parent’s classical pretension – Penelope, Iphigenia – or their lack of imagination: Matthew, son of Matthew, son of, er, Matthew. Some are shamefully double-barrelled or pointedly anonymous; pity poor Jane Doe, a government worker I found online during the research for this article. Some are just painfully embarrassing. A friend of mine grew up with a neighbour called ‘Brad Peet’. My own name, John, is an empty vessel. Being called John is like being called ‘name’.
Some names are ruined forever by one bad apple. I have never met anyone called Adolf, although I did find a ‘George Hitler’ on LinkedIn. He lives in Ohio and works as a digital product manager for Victoria’s Secret. (Hitler declined to be interviewed for this article.)
Sometimes a name takes on historical importance at precisely the wrong moment for some unsuspecting person. John Lennon was born the year before Love Me Do became The Beatles’ first number one. ‘Being from Liverpool makes it even worse,’ laughed Lennon in a gentle Scouse burr as we spoke on the phone from our respective quarantines. ‘I was 16 and I went to a nightclub in Liverpool. The police raided it and they asked me my name. They didn’t believe me. They would give me a smack or something.’
Lennon doesn’t like his namesake’s music. ‘They weren’t my favourite band at all.’ The solo stuff? ‘I always liked Paul McCartney more.’
‘When he died,’ said Lennon cheerfully, ‘I was on the shop floor in an engineering factory. God. The stick I took. Everyone saying “Aren’t you dead? Aren’t you supposed to be dead? Where’s Yoko?”
There have been some strange moments (‘I was in China once: everyone wanted to touch me, it was insane’), but Lennon took the long view on his lifelong accident of fate. ‘My dad always said to me, a name like mine breaks the ice immediately.’ He seemed to me very much like a man who got up to be John Lennon every morning with a smile on his face.
If Lennon was always too young to be mistaken for his namesake, the same isn’t true of Gina Miller, who says she has been contacted by 5 News on three separate occasions with requests for interviews.
‘They said something like, Hi Gina, I’m sure you’re incredibly busy with today’s court ruling… – it confused me because I wasn’t busy. I was in my pyjamas I think.’ (Miller declined to be interviewed by 5 News).
