The Names - Friday Flash

Sanchez (SS), Rodriguez (CF), Palmeiro (DH), Valdez (2B), Guerrero (1B), Reyes (LF), Castillo (3B), Martinez (C), Cruz (RF). The Dominican daily newspaper faithfully reported the baseball box scores. Day after day the players dreamed of a fat contract in the Major Leagues just across the ocean. The numbers against their name would be the key factor to securing that new life.

Morris (x4) 8.15. Carhart (x2) 9pm. O'Shaugnessey (x5) 8.45. Davidovich (x8) 8.30. Somers (x2) 9pm. Vickers (x4) 10pm. The Strickland party has just cancelled their reservation. That's eight meals the restaurant is out on, unless we get some walk up custom. Vickers, once a year on their anniversary; if you look back in the book exactly one year, there they'll be. Complementary drinks for them. Put the O'Shaugnessey party on the table for eight. Then we won't look so bereft...

Francoise Mauriac, Francis Jeansen, Jean-Paul Sartre, Guy Debord, Andre Breton, Marguerite Duras, Andre Masson, Alain Resnais, Simone Signoret, Maurice Blanchot, we the undersigned wish to state our opposition to the present governmental and national policy. We hope that the value and weight of our names on the spines of our books, on the credits of our movies and on the corners of our canvasses will help sway the minds of countless of our countrymen to apply their own names to our petition. Merci et vive la Republique!

Wayne Crawford Perth, Australia. Carla Baldelli, Bari, Richard and Diane Wood, Bath, UK. Angelos Charisteas, Thessaloniki. Radoslaw Murawski & Dariusz Glowacki, Wrocklaw, Polska. We love your holy cathedral, it is very inspiring. But we don't understand why people scratch their names into the wall when we are happy to sign this book of visitors. They spoil its beauty we think. You must take better care of the holy.

J.Clark 607701, 3 books history. N.Hardiman 644093, 2 books fiction, 1 book literary criticism. V.Stanger 688156, 1 book popular science. G.Oswald 633271, 3 audiobooks. K.Guptil 649757, 2 books renewed cookery /house and garden. L.Simmonds 656920, 5 books, romance (overdue fines paid in full)

Merrick L, Merrill N, Merry D, Merryman K, Merryweather B, Merryweather H, Mervyn P, Line after line, column after column, the ranks slaughtered trying to rush the enemy trenches of the First World War. The men drawn from this modest village into a worldwide conflict. Commemorated on the marble plinth bearing a white obelisk atop. The Church that played host to it now without a congregation as the youth have all long since left the area.

8.15 Miller B to D. 9.15 Coleman Brow Lift. 11.30 McCallister C to E. 13.30 Kavanagh Tummy Tuck 16.00 Reed Liposuction 17.45 Vincent B to DD. The names on the notes change, but not the hankering to be somebody else.

What's in A Name?

I write under a pseudonym. I have always sought to distance my writing life from my domestic one and psychologically that seemed an important facet of that compartmentalisation.

But I have always been fascinated by people operating under different names and have written about it in several of my novels. In my debut novel "A,B&E" a gangster's moll faked her own death to try and avoid the contract he'd put on her head, and needed a fake identity sharpish. 

For she simply cannot afford to be tracked down by her name. She can't appear on any bureaucratic lists. She has no driving licence, no social security paperwork, no health insurance records and no credit card in her (assumed) name. She has nothing to her name, not even her real name. 

"My assigned identity was forged for me by someone I’ve never even met. Karen Dash. My new moniker. A bit of a giggle. An in-joke on my way out the country." 

Karen's new identity is that bestowed on her by way of a counterfeit passport. The name 'dashed' off the top of the counterfeiter's head. Referring back to the high quality Swiss colouring pencils of my and maybe his childhood. Where he first had his interest pricked in visual reproduction. Do you remember Caran D'Ache colouring pencils? At the time they were as ubiquitous as the Swiss Army knife and gave the lie to Harry Lime's contention that Switzerland had only ever produced the "cuckoo clock". Now they brand themselves as "Maison de Haute Ecriture" (maybe Harry Lime had a point after all).

Karen Dash never existed, despite her larger than life presence on the pages of the novel. It is a name wrought to prevent her true identity being revealed, found and then expunged. It is a dead end of a name.

In my novel "Not In My Name" a homegrown terrorist stalks the internet looking for a patsy and necessarily adopting whatever name he requires for his task. The world of the internet is populated by soubriquets and people hiding their identity. Yet he is able to track down one specific person's true identity for he needs to groom her for his purposes....

In my new novel "Three Dreams in the Key Of G" I've taken the opposite tack. the three central female voices all have the same name in terms of the sound of their name.

First is the mother of two young daughters in post peace-agreement Northern Ireland

My name is Jean Ome. Phonetically speaking. And in actuality too, though I have no passport to prove this (denied me since now they bear the EC’s {Papist} impress). Nor do my other personalised permits and financial enablers bear this out, since my maiden name has never been supplanted (not because I’m an independent career woman, instead just too much of a put-upon mother to have gotten round to it). So in all my transactions outside the house promising to the bearer, I am still Jean Malcolm. She of a whole lifetime ago. Who gleefully mocks and taunts me for my divergence from her.

The family name really should be Home as in ‘home sweet home’, ‘home is where the heart is’ or ‘home and dry’. As in arid. Home is a very important concept where I come from. A closed, reinforced door, buttressing the street, the neighbourhood, the community, the town, the county and the province. Home is the be-all and end-all of who you are. It’s what you stand for, rather than it standing for you. Bricks and mortar proprietary, or bricks and mortar projectiles. Indeed, how we do hail from our unwelcoming streets.

The second is a seventy year old English woman domiciled in Florida, where she runs a shelter for victims of domestic violence. If only it was that simple...  

My name is Jean Ohm and I’ve encountered major amplitudes of resistance in my time. In fact, I’m generating some right now, through this little social experiment I’m currently conducting. We’ve got FBI, DEA, ATF and all manner of sect-obsessed acronyms and cult-crazed codons pointing their telescopic, turned-up snouts, to tune in to our drop-out community...

My name, as conferred upon me by my parents. Marking me for life. Or rather expunging me, as it now appears. Draped around me like the orange garb of the death row prisoner. The name embodies me, even as I enflesh it. But it was ever thus. The ‘H’ kept apart the feuding factions of my parents. The capital ‘O’ I take from my father, buffeting the stout, lower-case maternal ‘m’. Each seeking my allegiance against the other. Pressed in upon from both sides, until I lose consciousness and slip under. Thus is my feminised ‘h’ silenced and rendered inferior. A typographical error. The ‘O’ and ‘m’ too hellbent on knocking seven bells out of each other, to let anything come between them.

The third character, the human genome itself. Complaining at its assigned nomenclature, at our febrile assaults to decode its life-giving (and removing) mysteries.

My name – My name in full, apparently, by your latest dead reckoning, contains three billion characters. It is not the book itself that you are after reading, all two hundred volumes; more the thirty-odd thousand letters in the appellation which should adorn the book’s spine. Yet I remain innominate.


The historical practise of a wife taking her husband's surname, as with Jean Malcolm/ Jean Ome above, is still extant, as a woman is stripped of her identity which she grew up with and has a patrilineal name conferred upon her. 

All three of the female character in this novel fight back against such impositions upon them, in order to preserve their sense of self. And just what is the psychic link that unites all three of these characters?

Published by Dead Ink Books 26/07/2018

Available from Amazon and all good book shops in the UK

For videos, reviews and interviews

Laundry List - Friday Flash

He’d always had beautiful penmanship. His mother had inculcated it in him at the point of a scourge across his knuckles. Reiterated by the Monks who were his teachers at the school, though they hit harder with their rattan reeds. They broke knuckles, yet still that could not stem the flow of calligraphy. Curlicues, flourishes and twirls, anything to banish the dread straight line of a letter. Even though Bibles and prayer books were all mass printed these days, still he was demanded to learn the ancient skills of writing for parchment and scrolls. “Fire and soul” that was the holy grail of scrivening, though to his mind it was unclear what promised land it begat. 

Perhaps his mother had been farsighted when she had invested her meagre savings in a fountain pen all those years ago. For he had secured an administrative job in the Civil Service. A precious sinecure in these days of dearth and scarcity. An ornate script for sparse times. Yet he was no longer scripting proclamations of the latest rationing ordinances. It was a different sort of quota he was fashioning in Baroque swirls and convolutes. A winnowing at the point of his nib. 

It would have been faster to use a typewriter, but his superiors were paranoid about leaving traces behind. Carbon papers and the ribbons themselves could be deciphered for their tidings. He did wonder if this hinted that they knew their supremacy would come to an end and were already taking precautions to entomb their actions. He pressed the blotting paper, another potentially incriminating humble mainstay of his work, down on to his finished page. He examined it and saw his words reverse imprinted. Their beautiful cursive flow had become blotchy and tumescent as the paper had absorbed and diffused the pressure of his carefully calibrated ink. 

Two copies of every list. One for operational use, one as a record until presumably the operation had been completed, when both would be set fire to. No lasting traces. Immolation, the same fate as for those listed on the paper. In this new incarnation of his job, he really was like the scribes of old transcribing copies of the Holy Writ by hand, junking any that were not divinely flawless.

From the interrogations, Señor Nunez begat Señora Ordonez begat Señorita Guillen to their inquisitors. And all their names were on the list in his beautiful swooping script. A single letter hard to read might mean someone innocent was taken for extra-judicial sentencing. Although the children on the list must have been innocent at the very least. The Junta were playing judge, jury and executioner. But only he could play god through manifesting mercy. With a few missing strokes of his pen, he could perhaps save a name or two, leave them off the list altogether. His hand was cramping up. There were so many names to write these days. He stopped writing to rest his aching wrist. He held up his half inscribed sheet of paper. He’d always had beautiful penmanship. 


Taken from the Flash Fiction collection "Extra-Curricular". Available in print and e-book from Amazon, CreateSpace and I-Tunes.

Punk Rock Names - 10 of the best!

Reg Dwight changed his name to Elton John, David Jones to David Bowie, hinting at the slightly exotic stage personnas, but these are still recognisably 'normal' names, as in a first name and a surname. There were exceptions, such as the Big Bopper or Nico, but they were few and far between.

Then punk rock happened along and usually as a statement of attitude, invariably anti-establishment, the name became a crucial attribute of its bearer.

Here is a list in reverse order of my 10 favourite name bastardisations, with youtube links to the bands.

Please feel free to contribute your own punk rock name of choice, be it from an actual band, or merely one of your own devising were you in a band and no doubt fulfilling a fantasy of yours!

10) Richard Hell - Richard Hell and the Voidoids An apt name for the man with the best razor cut hair in rock and whose signature song was "The Blank Generation"

9) Jello Biafra and Klaus Flouride - Dead Kennedys Bespetacled bassist Flouride didn't look like a musician, while Biafra was a pure showman as a vocalist

8) Black Francis - The PixiesWhile he had chreubic features and the girth of a well fed monk, there was nothing angelic about Frank Black's voice when he let rip

7) Sonic Boom - Spacemen 3 For a band devoted to psychedelic research for their music, maybe Sonic was just disguising his identity from the Police, but the name fitted the sounds he got out of his guitar

6) Ari Up and Palm Olive - The Slits Palm Olive a delightful reference to the domesticity the Slits were all about leaving behind

5) Steve Ignorant and Eve Libertine - Crass Heavyweight punk-politicos, but their names conjure up cartoon figures

4) Lux Interior and Poison Ivy - The Cramps Husband and wife mainstays of seminal garage punk band The Cramps. Lux Interior RIP.

3) Vi Subversa and Lance D'Boyle - Poison Girls Vi was genuinely a subversive political punk, being a middle-aged mother of two when venturing on stage.

2) Poly Styrene - X Ray Spex There was nothing plastic about this London punk rock group

1) Chuck Biscuits and Joey Shithead - DOA While Mr Shithead went for the up front approach, drummer Chuck Biscuits is a constant source of delight to me whenever I recall his soubriquet. I don't know why, but the image of a hardcore punk band's drummer flinging not his drumsticks, but rather cookies into the audience tickles me. I don't think however that he lived up to his name, but I'm easily pleased.

Okay over to you pop punk pickers. What would be your chosen punk name? Pop it down in the comments and I'll pick my favourite. (Hint: Don't try any of those online name generators, they're awful for punk rock names- I know, I've tried them!)