A new month's resolution

As well as Vole, I have quite an ordinary name - one British people will have heard and maybe even seen, though it's a classic Irish one, simplified for an anglophone society.

Thanks to my parents, I've endured 35 years of misspellings: on meeting someone with the same name, conversation inevitably turns to the variety of distortions committed upon it.

In many ways, I'm quite resigned to people hearing my name and having a stab at it. No problem. What I fundamentally object to, however, is people who have only ever seen my name spelled correctly on screen or on paper - sent by me - and yet continually and consistently get it wrong. One individual has mailed me 350 times in the last 8 months, and has never once, not even accidentally, got it right. It smacks of laziness and contempt, of taking me for granted.

I have a new tactic. Whenever it happens in future, I'm going to respond by deliberately misspelling that person's name, however simple it may be. Let's see how long it takes them to get it right.

Childish? Perhaps. But fair.

Friday conundrum time!

It's Friday afternoon, so the staff here are obsessed with this Name Anagram Generator. If you're good at Scrabble, you can work out my actual name from Brainy Dean. The vice-chancellor, ironically enough, comes out as 'Principal Egos', and Zoot Horn is Calendar Girl. Poor Mark comes out as Jerk Moans.

Anyway, how about a conundrum. A practical one this time. Do I spend my spare money (e.g. what I don't spend on rent and books) on:

a) driving lessons. I'm 34 and haven't hitherto bothered.

b) more violin lessons. I wasn't much good. I'd practice now. Really.

c) smack. It's the only response to living in Wolverhampton.

What skill would you really like to acquire?

!Whatthefuck?

Occasionally, we're all faced with periods of introspection. Our lives seem worthless, our activities pointless, our presence a drag on our families, friends and colleagues.

I have the solution. Whenever you have a self-esteem crisis, open the website of !Whatif? They're an 'innovations' company. I've read their site and still don't know what they actually do (or even how to pronounce it). I have divined that they wear zany facial hair, combats, and revere Nathan Barley as some kind of god. They charge companies big fees for sounding like they know what's hip - that's as close as I can get. Their name makes me scream with impotent fury. It encapsulates a mindless kind of trendiness, covers utter intellectual bankruptcy. This is what we've done to this country. Honest people making things have been sacked. Bullshitters with no regard for the decencies of grammar run the world. How I hope the recession sends them back to the fields (or as in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, perhaps they'll be on the first ship to a new planet. We'll follow you, honestly).

There does seem to be a total loss of confidence in company names now too. British Telecom is now officially BP. Vesper Thorneycroft is now VT. The BBC's privatised engineering wing is Red Bee. British Airways is BA. British Petroleum is now BP. West Brom's failed art-gallery-and-whatever is 'The Public' and on and on - what's wrong with a name which says who you are, or what you do? Especially for the shameful industries - BAe (formerly British Aerospace) should be Shiny Weapons of Mass Destruction No Questions Asked, Bribes Available.

Nomenclature

My carefully worded complaint to management about the silent exclusion of all the humanities subjects from our new name was noted in much the same way that the Milky Way will react to the arrival of the Voyager probes (if they're going that way).

Anonymous friends responded in their own ways:

BCU: Performance, Media and English

Birmingham: College of Art and Law

De Montfort: Faculty of Humanities

Gloucestershire: Department of Humanities

Keele: School of Humanities and Social Sciences

Leicester: Faculty of Arts

Warwick: Faculty of Arts

Worcester: Institute of Humanities and Creative Arts

Wolverhampton: School of Law, Social Sciences, and Communications

Doubleplus good. He pushed the picture out of his mind. Humanities were a false memory. He was troubled by false memories occasionally.

Names are important

Those of you who know me professionally will be aware that I teach English Literature and Media Studies (and various other things on the side). So I'm in the School of Humanities, Languages and Social Sciences.

Except that I'm not. Now I'm in the School of Law, Social Sciences and Communications. Does this make me feel valued, loved and secure? It bloody doesn't. Does it make me feel that the Executive is a) incompetent and b) contemptuous of a large proportion of the school's activities? It bloody does.

What really angers me (and my colleagues here on the PGCE are using the phrase 'red mist' about me) is that Law, Social Sciences and Communications doesn't cover: English Lit, History, Politics, War Studies, Philosophy, Religious Studies, European Studies, Cultural Studies, Languages, Women's Studies, American Studies and only reductively, obliquely covers Linguistics, English Language, PR, Media Studies, Cultural Studies. Not only does this list cover more than half our degree courses, it covers way more than half of our students. Grrrr.