Believe it or not, as old Ripley was wont to say, my name is about to be immortalised in stone, and I'm not even dead. A quick perusal of my otherwise unexceptional CV will reveal that I once spent a year in New York, at the journalism school of Columbia University. And now the school informs me that it is going to erect a wall listing the engraved names of every graduate since 1912, when the place was founded by Joseph Pulitzer.
I’m not sure about this. It sounds worryingly like the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC, where relatives of the fallen come to locate their loved one’s name on a black basalt wall and make a rubbing of it. Still, don’t let that put you off. If you’re vacationing in Gotham this year, do take the IRT Broadway Uptown Local to the campus at W116th Street and make a rubbing of me if you so desire.
Maybe American wall-viewers will think I am, or was, Thomas Fitzsimons, who is thought to have been born in Ballykilty, Co Wexford. The last two digits of our birth years, his and mine, are the same, albeit 300 years apart. Thomas was head of the Friendly Sons of St Patrick in Philadelphia, fought in the Revolutionary War and was a signatory of the US Constitution, no less. I wouldn’t mind being confused with him.
But I hope Columbia gets my name right. On too many occasions in my lifetime I have found myself answering to “Geoffrey” and “Gordon” and even “Gregory”. As a matter of fact, one of my teachers at the journalism school occasionally referred to me in class as “Godfrey Cambridge” and was immediately consumed by embarrassÂÂÂment. (For those unfamiliar with American popular culture, Godfrey Cambridge was a comedian. An African-American comedian. I don’t care if he was a highly successful stand-up; I wasn’t him.)
I can’t imagine where my mother got the name from. Was it from Godfrey Evans, the great English wicketkeeper? No, his heyday was in the 1950s, too late. Was it from Godfrey Tearle, the British actor who had a supporting role in Hitchcock’s film of John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps and played a bishop in The Titfield Thunderbolt? No, my parents weren’t film buffs.
Or could it have been from Godfrey de Bouillon, a member of the French nation, who in the 12th century pursued the now-unfashionable avocation of Crusader, until he was killed by an arrow while besieging the city of Acre, or else succumbed after eating a poisoned apple, take your pick.
I greatly fear it may have been inspired by Godfrey Winn, an effeminate actor and columnist who wrote for the women’s magazines of the time (“Do you agree with me?” he would simper. “And if you do will you write to me about it? I hope you will. I do so love to receive your letters.” Yegghhh!
My surname, too, has caused some confusion, though not in this jurisdiction, where the Cambro-Norman Fitzes are a dime a dozen (we Fitzsimonses, I’m happy to say, are not common like those far-too-many Fitzgeralds and Fitzpatricks). Fitz, of course, means “son of” (French fils de), and for a long while I nurtured the view that, while de meant son of in Norman nomenclature (as indeed it does), fils de was confined to bastard sons. However, a French man disabused me of that piquant notion. They both meant the same thing, he said.
I once had to call the phone company in Maryland with some query or other. The woman said she would get back to me, and what was the name? “Fitzsimons,” I said. Now you know the way F and S sound the same on the phone. She called back. “Am I speaking to Mr Sid Simons?” she inquired civilly.
I made the mistake of telling this to my friend Melissa, and thereafter she always called me Sid. I attempted retaliation by dubbing her Dabney, but since this was her middle name anyway (she was from North Carolina), it wasn’t much of a counterblast.
And once, in the corporate headquarters of Thomas Cook in Peterborough, a little man who was showing me round kept addressing me as “Mr Persimmon”. From the Encyclopaedia Britannica: “PerÂsimmon: the usually orange several-seeded globular berry . . . that is edible when fully ripe but usually extremely astringent when unripe.”
Some disobliging people I know might think those last 10 words fit me to a T.