Both Barrels

The Tenth of July Two Thousand and Thirteen. Wednesday.

Twelve years ago last week I did that marriage thing. It was ace - didn't quite work out, though, but you know c'est la vie and all that. I believe that it was technically the Linen Anniversary and if I have one regret about the break up of my marriage it's that nobody bought me any sheets or curtains last Sunday. Or towels. Even if I wasn't partial to a bit of Douglas Adams that would have been nice.

Anyhoo, that was the day I took my wife's surname and became a Marsden Hendrick. Now, the prototype version of that name was formulated in the dying days of the Twentieth Century when we went and had one of those children things. Several decisions were made there and then. Firstly, Marsden Hendrick sounds better than Hendrick Marsden so we went for that. And we wanted a bit of room for manoeuvre on which bits of it to use so we forewent a hyphen. And lo, it came to pass, that the first Marsden Hendrick was initialised and he would go on to have the designation MH1.

(And yet, with a bit of Googling I discovered that there were Marsden Hendricks even a century before that. On the 25th November 1891 Gertrude Marsden married Elias Hendrick in Providence, Rhode Island. I don't know if they ever formally used the name Marsden Hendrick but they lived, raised a family and were buried together when they passed on. Here's their grave in Pocasset Cemetary in Cranston, RI.

Their son, Clifford signed up for the army at the age of 19 just as World War I was coming to a close. Here's his draft card and it's interesting to note he used Marsden as his middle name.

So there is a bit of history to the name - it's just that it's someone else's history.)

So there was (more than one) precedent for the Marsden Hendrick name when I came to marry. I always thought it was odd the way only the woman took the man's name and while I suppose there must be a better way of doing it, me adding my wife's surname (and following my son's name) seemed a working solution. Besides, I was inspired by one of my musical heroes. No, not John Ono Lennon. Paul Waaktaar-Savoy of a-ha, of course.

I'm not trying to be wacky or ironic there - he genuinely is. Here's 2 and a half minutes of his songwriting quality for you.

Now I realise that the logical conclusion of this would be that if any of my children married someone called, for example, Lucy Smith Jones, then my grandchildren would be Marsden Hendrick Smith Jonses. And their Children could be Kirkwood Nguyen Okeke Skenonton Marsden Hendrick Smith Jones, etc. But we'll let them worry about that, shall we?

Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, that's how I became a Marsden Hendrick, something I'm very proud of (my designation is MH3). There's even a family motto: "unum patitur, omnes pati" (bob that into Google translate if your Latin's not up to scratch). And despite most computers either demanding a hyphen (my payslip does this) or squashing the whole thing up into one long Marsdenhendrick (plane tickets, etc) my passport resolutely declares both of my barrels separated by a space.

More soonliest.