I don’t have a middle name and it was a such a source of irritation for me for the longest time. In fact, my whole name was. My parents must have got bored when it came to naming me. I was the fourth of four kids in four years for our Mam, and I genuinely think she couldn’t be arsed any more. ‘Just call him Paul. That’ll do.’

I would get teased with Paul McCartney at school, or Carnation Cream. Hardly the height of gangsta chic. I wanted a cool nick name – like Macka or Stevo or Tommy. If I had a cool nickname, I could be a cool kid. So, I used to invent nicknames I thought were cool and suggest them to the other kids. 

‘Hey, why don’t you start calling me Chilli? Like Chilli Con Carne. Get it? Chilli Con Carney. Oh God, I’m so funny aren’t I? Yeah, Chilli, that’s me.’

‘Shut up Carnation Cream, you stupid puff.’

This was England in the 70s. No one had heard of Chilli Con Carne, up north, back then. I was well read and dull. Brainy and boring, and I had the semolina of nicknames. 

I did get a chance to give myself a middle name though. When I was Confirmed in the Catholic Church, you could select your own middle name as part of the process. Never mind that this was an important step in my spiritual journey of faith as a Christian; forget that this was one of the seven sacraments of the Catholic Church, I had the exciting opportunity to select my own middle name! I’d never done anything by myself before. I’d never had the chance to be my own boss and make my own decisions. Here was my big chance. I could finally rid myself of my mundane monicker. I could break free from the shackles of my torturously tedious tags and be the cool guy with the cool name. Surely, all the kids would like me and want to be my friend?

So, here was my thinking. If I picked Stephen, I could get called Stevo; Thomas – Tommy. No, I have a brother called Steve and his middle name is Thomas. My other brother has a middle name Mark, so Marko was out too. I could have gone for some exotic Saint’s name (it had to be a Saint); maybe Simon (Simmo), Abraham (Abbo) or even Bartholomew (Barty). In fact, there are thousands of cool names I could have chosen. 

So what did I go for? John. Just plain old John. John. It’s nearly as plain as Paul. It’s so deathly dull – so utterly boring. (Sorry to all you guys named John.) It was so boring, it was just forgotten about as quickly as I did it, never to be mentioned again in our family history. It wasn’t unspeakable – some hideous event that brought utter shame on the family, like the time my cousin got caught shoplifting. No, this was just so dull that it was literally forgotten in an instant. It was too dull for anyone to remember. It was the lost car keys of Confirmation. The untraceable sock of nomenclature.

In my ten year old mind, I thought Paul John sounded safe, comfortable, proper. It hadn’t occurred to me at that age, that I might get nicknamed PJ, because PJ’s weren’t a thing then. In truth, I was too scared of being bullied to call myself Bartholomew, and in any case, I didn’t look like a Barty. I was a scruffy Council estate kid, not a posh privately educated toff. Paul John sounded right. It had a ring to it.

So no, I never had a middle name, or a nickname. I was never cool, or posh, or popular, and I think that’s because I was too scared to do anything that made me stand out, so I inadvertently named myself after a Pope.