Wish fullfilment and names!

They say you should be careful what you wish for. Well, people have been moaning about it being toooooo hot and so today we woke up to fog. A friend of mine posted a picture of sunset at Samil, a watery sun through some murky-looking mist. So the low cloud cover was clearly on its way in yesterday evening. It’s curious how we can have clear skies and sunshine at our end of Vigo, the Teis end, while she complains of mist and musk at Alcabre. They get the brunt of the Atlantic blanket coming in, I suppose.

The temperature gauges show a marked drop in temperature but this morning’s fog was still very clammy. It certainly made little difference to the night-time temperature - sticky weather for sleeping. Add to that the festivities that are going on at A Guía - the promontory you can see from our flats, a place we often walk to - and sleep is not going well at the moment.

We wondered the other day what was the origin on double-barrelled names in England. In Spain there is a long tradition of having two surnames, one from your father and one from your mother. This leads to much confusion when they discover that we British as a rule have only one. They often try to make my second forename into my fist surname. And so I find myself being addressed as Señora Margaret, as they assume that, of course, I will expect to be known principally by my “first surname”. A young friend of mine is often addressed as Señor George for the same reason.

When last we renewed our “tarjeta dorada”, the rail travel discount card for old biddies, the official at the station could not bring himself to leave one of the surname slots on the form empty. Consequently Phil’s card reads Philips Philips Adams. He has the added complication of having only one forename and so they invented one for him. Heaven help us if ever the cards are checked against passports. And then there is the fact that Philip became Philips this is another fairly frequent phenomenon. Our grandson, Matthew, was often called Matthews when he visited us.



Mind you, the British can be as bad with names. At least in my family. My Spanish nephew is called Andrés, a name my sister and her husband chose as being one the English relatives could relate to without difficulty. Besides, this followed another good Spanish tradition of giving the son his father’s name. We thought his father was called Avelino but it turned out he was really Andrés Avelino. (Like my Aunt Elizabeth Ethel, he was always known by his second name. Quite why my aunt preferred Ethel to Elizabeth I do not understand. On reflection though, she was of an age to have been named after the Elizabeth who later became queen, so maybe that had something to do with it.) The non-Spanish-speakers on the English side of the family moved the stress of Andrés to the initial A, making it more like Andrew. My brother, the joker, decided this was like andrex and proceded to call him Bog-Roll. Sometimes you can’t win.

Here’s another example: my Spanish niece’s partner is Miguel Angel, a common enough name, shortened to Migue, stress on the first syllable, by friends and family. When my English sister and I visited our Spanish sister earlier this year and met this young man, my English sister could not bring herself to call him by the shortened version of his name. She heard it as “Me gay” and felt embarrassed that she might be insulting him!! We had to change his name to Migui. Oh, boy!

Anyway, I did a mini-research project on English double-barrelled names and found this: “In British tradition, a double surname is heritable, and mostly taken in order to preserve a family name which would have become extinct due to the absence of male descendants bearing the name, connected to the inheritance of a family estate. Examples include Harding-Rolls and Stopford Sackville.”

Most of us associate it with poshness and snobbiness. Hence the Sackville-Bagginses in Tolkeins’s hobbit society.

“A few British upper-class families have "triple-barrelled" surnames (e.g. Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe; Cave-Browne-Cave; Elliot-Murray-Kynynmound; Heathcote-Drummond-Willoughby; Smith-Dorrien-Smith; Vane-Tempest-Stewart). Not all of those with multiple names were of the nobility; landed gentry such as George Henry Lane-Fox Pitt-Rivers consolidated the estates and wealth of several families in their multiple names. These are sometimes created when one spouse has a double-barrelled name and the other has a single surname.”

“Captain Leone Sextus Denys Oswolf Fraudatifilius Tollemache-Tollemache de Orellana Plantagenet Tollemache-Tollemache is sometimes quoted as the man with the most ever "barrels" in his surname (six), but in fact all but the last two of these (Tollemache-Tollemache) were forenames.”

What it didn’t mention was the fact that some children are now given two surnames as feminist mothers insist of their offspring having the mother’s name as well the father’s. Fair enough! You have to consider, however, the level of difficulty for the poor child learning to write his or her name. Our daughter’s latest offspring has an English name, Lydia Mei (the last spelt Chinese fashion like her Chinese grandmother’s), then a Chinese name, Wai Yin (which she will no doubt have to learn to write in Chinese characters at some point), but only one surname, her father’s. Her parents decided that to call her Wong-Adams or Adams-Wong would just give her altogether too many names!

These are the important things to take into consideration.