Nicks..

I love nicknames. I think they are such a cool, individual expression that someone else makes up about your appearance or peculiarities.

You can't choose one. That's not how it works. You need to be at school, minding your own business, and just for a second you let your inner personality slip, and BAM! you have a nickname for life. It's either that or you are just labelled by stature or facial characteristics.

I think I had possibly the shortest nickname in the world at school. It's also the most distinctive, and some of my friends still use it. This is what it was: [Place your tongue on the roof of your mouth, whilst inducing a vacuum within that space, and forcing the tongue downwards to produce a "kho!" sound]

That was my nickname. "Kho!". It derives from the word "Gherkin" which means tall person. Go figure. As I am nearly 6ft6, this was presumably an apt nickname. (Ironically, I can't actually make this sound :p )

Nicknames that have a family tree back to the dark ages are by far the best, when the name takes you on a journey from "Smith" to "Bacon Trousers McGee". It's almost like a form of rhyming slang, but taken to the extreme.

My closing point is that I think you need to embrace a nickname. If you strongly oppose it, then people are just going to use it more offensively, trying to get a reaction out of you. It becomes leverage, which soon is abbreviated into 'rage'. But if you decide to go along with it, a nickname becomes a term of endearment, used in good company to affirm your position in the herd. And as the young buffalo strays from its mother, the lion waiting by the waterhole-sorry, lost my train of thought. Oooooh Zebra!

So, go and be the "Baldy" or "Gangrene" or "Mufasa"'s of this world, and make my conversations with you a little more interesting, because frankly they've been a tad boring of late.

Toodle-pip,
andrewthekerr