SWARM

Occasionally a sentence drifts across the chill night air which sets you thinking about your place in the great scheme of things.

The other evening, as we were sitting in the living room deciding that there really wasn't anything on the TV worth watching at about seven-thirty, this sentence happened:

"We should go upstairs... Swarm...!"

Now, I've never in my life, as far as I'm aware, had a nickname. There may very well have been several - probably highly offensive or abusive - ones which have been used as soon as I've left the room, but I doubt even that. To acquire a nickname you have to be noticed, and I've spent a great deal of my life trying not to let that happen.

Anyway, if I did have a nickname, I suspect it was unlikely to be something as exotic and interesting sounding as "Swarm" to be perfectly honest. It is far more likely to have been something along the lines of "Dullard", "Bland" or "Pointless" or something equally nondescript.

"Swarm" conjures up images of dodgy geezers with interesting hair and body art, wearing the kind of avant garde and much distressed clothing which would have utterly appalled my grandmother, or the kind of people in films who are lurking on the shadier side of life, selling illegal products, living very dangerously interesting lives, and who will no doubt come to a sticky end at some point before the final reel and far before their potential time.

In my mind, "Swarm" resembles Danny (He of the "Camberwell Carrot" in "Withnail and I"), and wears a sleeveless denim jacket pierced with several hundred metal studs, and rides a huge motorbike which is, of course, an image just about as far removed from my own tiresomely tweedy and conventional look as it is possible to get.

Anyway, as you will have already worked out, "Swarm" was merely a contraction of "It's warm" and my momentary sense of a potential change of lifestyle was very swiftly stuffed back inside its bottle, never to escape again, whilst the relative cosiness of a duvet beckoned to take me out of the draughts.

However, as I was pondering upon nicknames the following morning, I saw a headline in one of the daily papers which was being held up by one of the presenters of Breakfast television, the watching of which is a "Rock'n'Roll" lifestyle choice if ever there wasn't one…

"Typhoon could hit F1 title chase" it said, and I immediately thought that it was referring to one of those sporting nicknames so prevalent in the sporting pages, ones about which - along with their real names, of course - I am mostly very ignorant, and that a dashing young driver named "Typhoon" had somehow come out of nowhere to challenge the main title contenders.

Naturally, I was wrong about that, as an actual typhoon was moving into view in the general vicinity of wherever that race was being run, but I thought it was interesting that my mind went immediately to the nickname rather than the weather situation, which probably just speaks volumes about how I read the newspapers these days.

Of course, now I find myself thinking that I really ought not have been quite so flippant, given that the typhoon itself actually appears to have had rather devastating consequences for both the race itself and for one young driver in particular, but, hey, if we knew the outcome and consequences of every offhand remark, some of us might end up never speaking at all.

Which might not be the worst thing, I suppose...

Still, I find myself wondering whether I've simply never been interesting enough to have earned a nickname…?

And that's a whole other story...