Being Andrew…

My name is Andrew and I’m a…well, I’ll leave you to fill in the missing word for yourself.

What’s in a name I wonder? Well, quite a lot in my case, I really don’t like mine. It galls me to tell you that I had no part in choosing my name and therefore its awful blandness and mediocrity isn’t really anything to do with me. I’m not really an Andrew at all, I’m far more exotic: a Zane, a Rhys, a Salvador, a Faust, anything but an Andrew.

According to the tale told by my mother, who sometimes struggles with truth I fear, it was the midwife’s Chinese assistant who named me Andrew. The midwife herself, Nurse Gubbins, was a Dickensian character of exceeding plumpness and bustle and I occasionally wonder if her assistant was also stereotypical, sporting immensely long pointed nails and a mandarin moustache.

Anyway, it would seem that neither of my parents could be bothered to name me themselves. So they asked a complete stranger to stand in for them in the naming process. Most parents think long and hard about their all important babies’ name, making lists, discussing it with friends. Not mine; they brought in a surrogate namer (lucky me) - typical really.

Why Andrew should have popped into the Chinese midwifery assistant’s head puzzles me to this day. Andrew isn’t exactly a Chinese name. But then maybe she had some Scottish connections, perhaps she was a MacWong or McChen.

Just why Miss MacWong couldn’t have picked a Chinese name like Changpu (forever simple), or Dong (winter), or even Lonwei (dragon greatness) as my Christian name leaves me pondering something that Confucius might have said at a time when he was in an extremely bad mood. I’d have been happy with Tèbié chǎofàn (special fried rice) if she’d picked it. But no, out of her inscrutable mind came Andrew and that was it; the deal was done and I was doomed to wander through life with one of the most ordinary of names.

Andrew? Why Andrew? There were four other bloody Andrews in my class at infant school. They followed me all through my school years only to be replaced by a different set of five Andrews at university and another seven (not all magnificent) Andrews when I went off to work.

Andrew is such an ordinary and common name; so common that they burdened Prince Andrew Duke of York with it - to make him more accessible to ordinary commoners - only a few years after I was given that label. Mind you he did have ‘Duke of York’ to fall back on whilst I didn’t. Maybe the Queen and Phillip named him after me. I wonder if they had a Chinese midwife who they casually asked to name their son.

“Would one care to suggest a name for my husband and I’s offspring Miss McChen?”

The list of names available to monarchy is probably shorter than the norm – I can’t imagine a Prince Zach or Justin – so maybe, for them, Andrew was just the best of a bad bunch with Charles already taken.

Mind you, even with all the names in the world to choose from (which my parents had) I can’t imagine either of my parents breaking away from the expected. So it’s unlikely they’d have ever come up with a Troy, a Sven, or an Ilya - even a Bertie would have probably been stretching them to their limits.

So Andrew it was. Boring, dull, commonplace, and hardly likely to encourage me to make a name for myself.

A less than inspired choice, but not as bad as the name they dared to choose for my middle name…