In early 2003, when I was doing my GCSEs and Google was a more young and hopeful place, I searched for my own name. ‘Ed Cumming’ throws up a few different things online and we needn’t go into all of them here, but the salient discovery was that there was another Ed Cumming. He was a student at Cambridge, evidently a few years older than me, with a publicly visible email address. I sent him a note. ‘How funny, we have the same name,’ I said, or words to that effect. ‘Right you are, you little freak,’ he replied, or words to that effect, with the polite reserve of someone edging away from a lunatic at a bar.
20 years later, we finally arranged to meet. I needed a free lunch in a hurry. Kolae, a smart new Thai restaurant in Borough Market, graciously stepped up.
As I checked in with the front of house, I noticed that the reservation on the iPad said ‘Ed Cummings’. This may come as a surprise to readers with a puerile bent, but one of the most annoying things about being called Cumming is people’s instinct to pop an s on the end. As far as I know, no other surname has this problem to the same extent. Nobody mistakenly writes down John Smiths or Andy Murrays. Reading this, it is possible even some of you are under the impression I am called Cummings. I blame E. E. and, more recently, Dom, for the error, which comes to grate much more than the obvious jokes.
In this instance, I reflected, for the first time ever the plural was correct. There were two Ed Cummings. Maybe the staff had meant it. But was that even the correct plural? Should we be Eds Cumming? As I say, I don’t want to seem narcissistic, but Ed Cumming is a name in the intersection of ‘a bit unusual’ and ‘not weird enough for there not to be a few of you’.
If you have a common-as-muck name, like Charles Baker, you grow up comfortable that there are lots of people with your name. Chris Evans isn’t even the most famous Chris Evans. If you have an unusual name, Cush Jumbo, say, you spend your whole life confident that there is just you. It would be a good topic for psychologists to research. Is it healthier to feel special or to know you are part of the mass of humanity?
Before I could dwell on this any longer, Ed Cumming had appeared behind me and was soon shaking my hand. I reflected sadly that he was noticeably thinner and more handsome than me, with a commanding aquiline vibe that others, including my wife, have compared to Tom Hiddleston.
‘Don’t you hate it when people put an ‘s’ on the end?’ he asked. We were off.
‘I have a picture-perfect memory of where I was sitting when that email dropped into my inbox,’ he said. ‘I was like, what?’
