Second Sunday

I went to the church on Saturday morning, to add a few finishing touches to some notices that I wanted to appear in the newsletter, and on the way back I decided to drop in at my daughter’s house, to see her and the grandchildren.  The youngest was very excited because it’s only four days until his third birthday.  He so easily might not have been.  After the second child, my daughter hadn’t intended to have any more and I was horrified to discover that she had had a coil fitted.  It’s a barbaric device.  But she conceived despite it!
I said to her “There!  If it’s God’s will then no amount of human intervention can prevent it!”
I said, “He has come into this world against the odds.  You should call him Victor!”
They finally settled on the name Kim.  He has a zest for life, that boy.  Even my son-in-law concedes “he does have a spring in his step.”

I had a conversation with my son-in-law in the kitchen then and he was telling me about the small business he is starting up, selling greetings cards, wrapping paper and the like on the Internet; things for birthdays, Christmas, Easter, anniversaries and weddings; stag nights too, apparently.
“First Holy Communion cards?”  I asked.
He said no.
“And what is the name of your venture?”  I asked.
He mumbled something.
“I’m sorry, can you repeat that?”  I said.
He said “it’s called For Any Occasion, but I’ve dropped the ‘A’ at the start of Any and the ‘O’ at the start of Occasion.”
“Why?”
“It makes it roll off the tongue more smoothly.”
“I don’t see why you should have to mutilate the words like that,”  I said. “Why not stick with it in its original form?  For Any Occasion.  It’s a good, solid name.  They’re three good solid words.  They make the enterprise sound, well …  solid,  and reliable.”
But he said he wanted something that easily rolled off the tongue. I rolled it off my tongue.  For ‘ny ‘ccaision. I’d heard it somewhere before.
“Are you sure there isn’t a company with that name already?” I asked him.
But he said he had managed to register it without any problems.  I supposed it must have been one I remembered from my childhood and therefore is no longer in existence.  And anyway, he said that that was the effect he wanted to create with the name: something that sounded immediately familiar and therefore trustworthy.  I wished him every success and after bidding farewell to my daughter and grandchildren I returned home.

Nevertheless it kept nagging away at me for the whole of the afternoon.
I asked my wife “Did Eliot tell you about the new company he is setting up?  The name he’s chosen for it — I recognise it from somewhere and I just can’t quite…”
She asked me what the name was and I told her and immediately I knew why it was so familiar to me and blood rushed to my head.

I took the dogs out for a long walk on the common to regain my composure.