8:22am Tuesday 28th April 2009
By Alan Molineaux
Have you ever thought of changing your name? Every now and then I would like a name that I didn’t have to spell; my surname having all the vowels in it and an X to add to its Scrabble-like usefulness.
In the main, however, I am quite happy with it and with my first name, even thought I tend to shorten it to a more informal Al.
I worked at a company at which one of the managers thought my name was Albert and called me such for the first few years of my employment. After the first few times of not correcting him, it seemed easier to leave him in his ignorance.
This weekend we had the joy of going to a concert with three of our daughters and son-in-law. Our chosen artist was Ben Taylor, the son of James Taylor and Carly Simon (if I need to explain, either you are too young or I am too old).
We had an extra member of our party, Luke, who was the tattooed best man at our daughter’s wedding, and so he was included as family for this outing.
The gig was small, considering the artist’s pedigree, being held in a room above a pub holding no more than 100 people. The concert was excellent, not least because I could see the guitarist’s fingerwork.
Following the show, we were all invited to visit the product table where Ben and his band would happily sell us CDs and merchandise, even offering to sign any of our purchases.
Mrs M and I declined the offer of autographs, only joining in to get our photograph taken with the son of one of our favourite performers.
The rest of our party were eager to take full advantage of having the stars of the show so close and queued to meet the singer and his band members. Even Luke, who had never taken the trouble to have anything signed before, was impressed enough to wait in line.
He returned to the rest of the group looking a little nonplussed by the experience. It appeared that Ben had misunderstood the request for the dedication be given to Luke mistaking his name for Duke.
‘To Duke, thanks for coming to the show, Ben Taylor’ The confusion probably lay in the fact that the singer was from America and our best man is from Devon.
We had a few similar difficulties during our recent trip to Florida with one ice-cream parlour worker mistaking my request for Butter Pecan flavour for Mississippi Mud Pie. Its hard to see how the two could be confused in any language.
I consoled Luke with this story and the thought that it could have been worse if his tattoo artists had misheard him in a similar way.
You can sell a CD dedicated to Duke on eBay, but not a faulty piece of body art.
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