The Guinea Stamp
by Alasdair McPherson
Genre: Humour
Swearwords: None.
Description: What's in a name?
_____________________________________________________________________
Most of the people on the island are related: there is a noticeable lack of variety in surnames. Even Christian names are chosen from a limited shortlist since the custom of naming children after their grandparents persists. The most extreme case I know of is identical twin boys both Christened Peter – the eldest (by just over a minute) after the paternal grandfather and the younger after the maternal grandsire.
When you are in the throes of courting it is hard enough to remember to ask your lover’s full name and address far less stop to consider the consequences of the names of grandparents. It is only when the honeymoon is over and lust has faded to an odd twinge, like rheumatics only more fun, that practical considerations make themselves apparent; for example: will she look like her mother in another twenty years?
Perhaps this is why we have more or less scrapped this naming custom in the cities. How ridiculous, after all, to have twins named Peter when they could have proudly borne traditional Scottish names like Wayne or Tyrone. You know you are home when, strolling at dusk through the urban box canyons of Maryhill or Denniston, you hear the maternal chorus:
“Ho! Wayne! C’mon on in, son. Ye’r tea’s ready.”
“Is your Clint still oot, Belle? So’s ma Tyrone. See me, a’ll skin him when a get hold of him!”
“C’mon and gi’e yer mammy a wee kiss, Wayne.”
“Gives me a break, mother, I’m a twenty-four year old chartered accountant.”
“You’ll always be my wee wean, Wayne.”
In the more refined parts of the British Isles the Peters might have been distinguished by tagging them ‘major’ and ‘minor’ but on the island they were given nicknames. Many of these derive from the occupation of the individual like Neil the Post or Iain the Pier.
When I hear people say that they are tracing their ancestry through the census or parish records, I often wonder how they might do it on the island: there is no register of nicknames, or of their relationship to the baptismal record. Government documents like the census or pension book are a necessary evil, an invasion of privacy that may be legal but is not wholly welcome.
The islanders know what they are doing although it may sometimes seem strange to outsiders. For example Neil the Post has been retired for a number of years now. The mail is now delivered by his son, Christened Lachlan but known by everyone as ‘Young Neil’ or ‘Neilac’. His friends from school have always called him Neilac and even his wife does – at least when they are in company (She has a fine voice so we know of several other epithets she uses despite the metre thick walls of their croft house.)
My Uncle James was called ‘Philip’ by everyone on the island. It came about in this way: in Gaelic, James is Seamus; in the United States a shamus is a private detective; the best known private eye when James was young was Philip Marlowe; simple really!
The custom of soubriquets is so pervasive that strangers are often totally unaware of the given name. I was down at the boat one day when the laird scrunched onto the shingle.
“Is Philip about? He asked, looking me up and down.
“Uncle James,” I yelled expecting that he would hear me in the byre where he was mending creels.
“Will your Uncle James know where Philip is?”
It turned out that he wanted my uncle to take a friend of his up to the lochan behind the croft where there were some well-grown trout.
“He’s a lord, don’t ye know,” added the laird. “So look after the chap – see he gets into a couple of nice fish.”
The lord arrived later in the mandatory Range Rover from which he extracted enough gear to mount a trans-Andean expedition. He was tall, spare and slightly stooped; his military air was so pronounced that it was hard not to come to attention and salute.
“A very nice man, with no side to him,” the laird had assured us. He shook Uncle James by the hand just as if they were equals, as he looked him over from wellingtons to knitted cap. I seemed to be somewhere below his radar: he neither looked at me nor talked to me!
“No need for formalities here, Philips. All lads together, what? No need for you to call me ‘your lordship’ all the time – just call me ‘sir’.”
Having established his credentials as a man of the people, equitable to a fault, he strode off leaving James and I to carry all the gear.
The evening was a mixed success. The midges were out so the lord, being a non-smoker, was in great discomfort. On the other hand, the trout were equally irritated and snapped intemperately at the fly specially selected by Uncle James. The lord had been inclined to dispute the choice of lure at first since he had brought a selection of flies prepared for him “by a little man in London who has a wonderful understanding of these things”.
In the end he bowed to local knowledge so we were able to net three nice trout, one of them more than two pounds in weight.
The laird met us and whisked us off for a celebratory drink. I was sent to the kitchen where I was royally treated with ginger beer and ham sandwiches with lashings of mustard. In the gun room, James was supplied with beer, which he loathes, while the lord and the laird made inroads into a good claret that he would have appreciated.
“I feel sorry for the laird,” James told me on the way home. “These incomers think they are doing him a favour by landing on him expecting to be entertained. It would have cost the noble lord hundreds if he had paid full whack but I’ll bet he hasn’t even given the laird a bottle of whisky.
“It was excruciating to watch the laird trying to find a topic of conversation that would spark a response. He finally hit on the key: money!”
“Philip takes a bit of an interest in the Stock Exchange, you know”. The laird is always keen to point out the best features of his livestock whether cattle or crofters.
“Does he indeed,” replied the visitor, smiling vaguely then turning his back on James. “Well, gold’s the thing. Best hedge there is against recession. Never go wrong with gold. Just been on to my broker to buy: he gave me a good deal – almost insider trading. You should get into gold, Henry,” he enjoined the laird.
The laird winked at my uncle, who put down his barely tasted drink and prepared to leave. The lord fumbled about in his purse and finally produced a rather crumpled ten pound note.
“Thank you, your lordship. It is very generous you are sir. Would you be wanting change?”
The laird had to have a coughing fit at this point to avoid laughing out loud.
On the way home, Uncle James told me that the laird was chairman of an investment club that most of the locals belonged to. The meetings tended to be informal, conducted over a pint or a gate more often than not. Only that morning he had met Neilac, the treasurer, and James, the secretary, on the pier when the three office bearers had agreed to sell the gold and gold-mining shares they had bought some weeks before. They felt that, with the recession easing, gold prices would fall and that they should reinvest in oil shares as the most likely to rise when the economy started moving.
The club had made more than twenty thousand pounds on their gold trading, a return of just under forty percent.
“Thank God for ignoramuses like his lordship,” Uncle James grinned at me. “If it wasn’t for the likes of him buying when sensible men are selling we would all be much poorer!
“I used to worry about the people who lost money when we made a big profit. Now that I have met the noble lord I can sleep easier.
“He thinks he has put one over on the benighted peasantry, and we have profited by his folly so we are all tolerably happy. Even you got a belly full of food and ginger beer!”
Swearwords: None.
Description: What's in a name?
_____________________________________________________________________
Most of the people on the island are related: there is a noticeable lack of variety in surnames. Even Christian names are chosen from a limited shortlist since the custom of naming children after their grandparents persists. The most extreme case I know of is identical twin boys both Christened Peter – the eldest (by just over a minute) after the paternal grandfather and the younger after the maternal grandsire.
When you are in the throes of courting it is hard enough to remember to ask your lover’s full name and address far less stop to consider the consequences of the names of grandparents. It is only when the honeymoon is over and lust has faded to an odd twinge, like rheumatics only more fun, that practical considerations make themselves apparent; for example: will she look like her mother in another twenty years?
Perhaps this is why we have more or less scrapped this naming custom in the cities. How ridiculous, after all, to have twins named Peter when they could have proudly borne traditional Scottish names like Wayne or Tyrone. You know you are home when, strolling at dusk through the urban box canyons of Maryhill or Denniston, you hear the maternal chorus:
“Ho! Wayne! C’mon on in, son. Ye’r tea’s ready.”
“Is your Clint still oot, Belle? So’s ma Tyrone. See me, a’ll skin him when a get hold of him!”
“C’mon and gi’e yer mammy a wee kiss, Wayne.”
“Gives me a break, mother, I’m a twenty-four year old chartered accountant.”
“You’ll always be my wee wean, Wayne.”
In the more refined parts of the British Isles the Peters might have been distinguished by tagging them ‘major’ and ‘minor’ but on the island they were given nicknames. Many of these derive from the occupation of the individual like Neil the Post or Iain the Pier.
When I hear people say that they are tracing their ancestry through the census or parish records, I often wonder how they might do it on the island: there is no register of nicknames, or of their relationship to the baptismal record. Government documents like the census or pension book are a necessary evil, an invasion of privacy that may be legal but is not wholly welcome.
The islanders know what they are doing although it may sometimes seem strange to outsiders. For example Neil the Post has been retired for a number of years now. The mail is now delivered by his son, Christened Lachlan but known by everyone as ‘Young Neil’ or ‘Neilac’. His friends from school have always called him Neilac and even his wife does – at least when they are in company (She has a fine voice so we know of several other epithets she uses despite the metre thick walls of their croft house.)
My Uncle James was called ‘Philip’ by everyone on the island. It came about in this way: in Gaelic, James is Seamus; in the United States a shamus is a private detective; the best known private eye when James was young was Philip Marlowe; simple really!
The custom of soubriquets is so pervasive that strangers are often totally unaware of the given name. I was down at the boat one day when the laird scrunched onto the shingle.
“Is Philip about? He asked, looking me up and down.
“Uncle James,” I yelled expecting that he would hear me in the byre where he was mending creels.
“Will your Uncle James know where Philip is?”
It turned out that he wanted my uncle to take a friend of his up to the lochan behind the croft where there were some well-grown trout.
“He’s a lord, don’t ye know,” added the laird. “So look after the chap – see he gets into a couple of nice fish.”
The lord arrived later in the mandatory Range Rover from which he extracted enough gear to mount a trans-Andean expedition. He was tall, spare and slightly stooped; his military air was so pronounced that it was hard not to come to attention and salute.
“A very nice man, with no side to him,” the laird had assured us. He shook Uncle James by the hand just as if they were equals, as he looked him over from wellingtons to knitted cap. I seemed to be somewhere below his radar: he neither looked at me nor talked to me!
“No need for formalities here, Philips. All lads together, what? No need for you to call me ‘your lordship’ all the time – just call me ‘sir’.”
Having established his credentials as a man of the people, equitable to a fault, he strode off leaving James and I to carry all the gear.
The evening was a mixed success. The midges were out so the lord, being a non-smoker, was in great discomfort. On the other hand, the trout were equally irritated and snapped intemperately at the fly specially selected by Uncle James. The lord had been inclined to dispute the choice of lure at first since he had brought a selection of flies prepared for him “by a little man in London who has a wonderful understanding of these things”.
In the end he bowed to local knowledge so we were able to net three nice trout, one of them more than two pounds in weight.
The laird met us and whisked us off for a celebratory drink. I was sent to the kitchen where I was royally treated with ginger beer and ham sandwiches with lashings of mustard. In the gun room, James was supplied with beer, which he loathes, while the lord and the laird made inroads into a good claret that he would have appreciated.
“I feel sorry for the laird,” James told me on the way home. “These incomers think they are doing him a favour by landing on him expecting to be entertained. It would have cost the noble lord hundreds if he had paid full whack but I’ll bet he hasn’t even given the laird a bottle of whisky.
“It was excruciating to watch the laird trying to find a topic of conversation that would spark a response. He finally hit on the key: money!”
“Philip takes a bit of an interest in the Stock Exchange, you know”. The laird is always keen to point out the best features of his livestock whether cattle or crofters.
“Does he indeed,” replied the visitor, smiling vaguely then turning his back on James. “Well, gold’s the thing. Best hedge there is against recession. Never go wrong with gold. Just been on to my broker to buy: he gave me a good deal – almost insider trading. You should get into gold, Henry,” he enjoined the laird.
The laird winked at my uncle, who put down his barely tasted drink and prepared to leave. The lord fumbled about in his purse and finally produced a rather crumpled ten pound note.
“Thank you, your lordship. It is very generous you are sir. Would you be wanting change?”
The laird had to have a coughing fit at this point to avoid laughing out loud.
On the way home, Uncle James told me that the laird was chairman of an investment club that most of the locals belonged to. The meetings tended to be informal, conducted over a pint or a gate more often than not. Only that morning he had met Neilac, the treasurer, and James, the secretary, on the pier when the three office bearers had agreed to sell the gold and gold-mining shares they had bought some weeks before. They felt that, with the recession easing, gold prices would fall and that they should reinvest in oil shares as the most likely to rise when the economy started moving.
The club had made more than twenty thousand pounds on their gold trading, a return of just under forty percent.
“Thank God for ignoramuses like his lordship,” Uncle James grinned at me. “If it wasn’t for the likes of him buying when sensible men are selling we would all be much poorer!
“I used to worry about the people who lost money when we made a big profit. Now that I have met the noble lord I can sleep easier.
“He thinks he has put one over on the benighted peasantry, and we have profited by his folly so we are all tolerably happy. Even you got a belly full of food and ginger beer!”
About the Author
Originally from Dalmuir, Alasdair McPherson is now retired and living in exile in Lincolnshire.
He says he has always wanted to write, but life got in the way until recently. He has already penned two novels and is now trying his hand at short stories.
He says he has always wanted to write, but life got in the way until recently. He has already penned two novels and is now trying his hand at short stories.