Everyone says it, and I think Harry Enfield did a sketch about it once. Or was it those guys who did Peep Show? I can’t remember, but it is true. We all fall for it. Because what’s in a name, eh?
I sit here, killing time, in the coffee shop of the Royal Exchange, with my overpriced flat white and this piece of old fruit cake. Ordinary, everyday fruit cake. Three pound and ninety-five pence this cost me. That’s quite pricey but I suspect it is vegan and artisan. As I stare at the dried-up raisins and bits of cherry I think: let’s play the name-change game!
Say you add to this bit of crappy fruit cake that hard icing, the stuff that chips your fillings. Maybe then you add some marzipan. I loathe marzipan. Who in their right mind likes marzipan? But anyway. How much for this new fruit cake with sugary extra bits? Say, tops, forty for the whole cake? Even in M&S I don’t think you’d pay more than forty for a whole cake. Right. We’ve all got that so far? Good. OK. Let’s change its name!
Now, we are going to call it a ‘Wedding Cake’.
How much now? How much for a Wedding Cake? One hundred, two hundred, surely not three hundred quid? Are you fucking joking? It’s a cake.
My mother took me to one of those wedding fayres, with a ‘y’. Prissy little up-dos in perfect make-up, looking me up and down whilst holding platters of tiny squares of fruit cake: ‘Would you like to try one of our Supreme Wedding Cake Bites, Miss?’
Bloody ‘Miss’. Bloody ‘Supreme’. Bloody ‘Bites’! I tried several, and they all tasted the fucking same.
Oh, also, don’t forget that you can’t just buy the one cake. Christ no, that would be mad. Just the one cake? What are you thinking? No, no, no. For the full Wedding Cake effect, you need three or four of the bastards, balanced on top of each other so you’re wondering when it’s all going to collapse in on itself.
They’re professionals, you know, the prissy up-dos. Well-trained, well-dressed, well, well, well.
And in a way, you’ve got to admire them. They use a reverse psychology technique. They pull an empathetic face and, with a little shy giggle, they go, ‘Well, of course you can get just an ordinary cake for your special day, but… well… it-is-once-in-a-lifetime, isn’t it? If you don’t think it’s worth it of course, but it is your special one-off-never-happen-again-day… but if you don’t think it’s worth it… if you don’t think you’re worth it.’
But I’m just getting married. That’s all. Just getting married. Can’t it simply be that?
Don’t be naïve. It’s an industry unto itself. Cake, rings, venue, meal, dress, flowers and favours! That’s the latest one – favours. ‘What the bloody hell are favours?’ I asked. And they were off: goldfish in a bowl centre of the table, everyone takes one home? Miniature whisky for the gents, bonbons for the ladies? Button badges announcing Karen loves Jason?
I don’t know who Karen and Jason are, those are the first names that came into my head. Why did those names come into my head? Why didn’t our names come into my head? Fuck.
After the Wedding Fayre debacle, Mark and my mother decided to take over. I am useless, apparently. No one knows what’s wrong with me, no one knows why I’m not like a proper girl/woman/female of the species.
It’s fine. Honestly, it’s all fine. But he’s right, they’re right, he is better at this sort of stuff. It’s like, right now, I’m supposed to be thinking about bridesmaids. I don’t know what I’m supposed to be thinking of in relation to bridesmaids but that is what I’m supposed to be doing. They said, ‘Go and get yourself a nice coffee and cake and have a think about bridesmaids.’ So, here I am, sat with a coffee and a bit of cake and any minute now, I’m gonna do it. I am. Here goes. Here we go, here we go: I am thinking about bridesmaids.
Done. I thought about bridesmaids. Wanna know what I thought? I thought: I don’t fucking care about bridesmaids.
And here’s another thing I don’t care about – the fact that now I have a dress fitting booked. I have never in my life had a dress fitted. But now I am about to have a dress fitted. All because we had that one little moment of romance.
Oh, God, it was such a little moment, and I’m not even sure that using the word ‘romance’ is right. We’ve always known we’d be together for the rest of our lives, and for years it has been nice and right and just as it should be. Then one random day, we were sat in the pub, quiz night, pint each, and he goes: ‘Fancy getting married?’ I laughed, but he didn’t, so then I went, ‘Yeah, OK, why not?’ I thought it would be a laugh, imagined it would be him and me in a registry office with the cleaner and the cab driver as witnesses, because marriage was the important thing, not the ceremony. I hate ceremonies. Missed my graduation, didn’t go to anything like that at school, ‘cos I do not like a fuss. He knows that. Knows me. Or so I thought. Then, my mother caught wind and that was that. She’s bridezilla mother. And now we’re on the ride, screaming – me, because I don’t want to go faster and I can’t get off. It needs to stop.
I know Mark is just being good, helping out, because he knows I can’t. And I trust him. Trusted. Thought we’d agree on most things. But then, after the invitations went out, he put up a post on all of his socials, saying: ‘I love you Mrs Mark Adams.’
Mrs Mark Adams.
My eyes blurred, and went hot. I felt sick and I cried. And then I went ballistic.
I can’t properly remember, but I know I shouted a lot and I said, ‘Hold on, no, this is not bloody on, hold on one moment please. I am Sarah Read. I was born Sarah Read. I grew up Sarah Read. I shall die Sarah Read because that is who I am. That is my name. And names are important. A name can triple the price of a fruit cake.’
And he looked hurt and said, ‘But it’s tradition, it’s what you do. What if we have kids, you’ll have a different name to the rest of us, how will that work? You’re not thinking straight, you’re not thinking ahead. And anyway,’ he said, ‘it’s a romantic gesture.’
Then my mother said all the same things. Then my best friend and my sister, and his sister. They all said the same thing. ‘Everyone’s out of step except our Johnny,’ as my granddad used to say.
I said to them, ‘You do know the name change thing dates from when women didn’t have identities of our own and we were considered chattels, similar to slaves who had to take their masters’ names? It’s about ownership.’
And they scoffed. Told me I was being stupid, it wasn’t like that anymore, it was romantic, it was the thing to do, it was empowering, even. Someone tried to tell me it was illegal not to, but I looked it up, and they were lying. No, this whole name change shit is apparently just what you do.
Well, let’s examine this ‘it’s just what you do’. Firstly, it is a tradition. What does that mean? It’s a tradition that we remind women they’re second-class citizens by refusing them the right to have their own name? What is a tradition? Something that we all accept and if you don’t do it then you’re the oddball? Thinking about it like that, there are a lot of traditions we’ve let slip away because they are – I don’t know – bloody mad and plain old wrong. Like drinking six or seven pints and then driving home, that was something of a tradition a fair few years ago. Shagging your secretary at work, or at least having a grope, smoking three packs of cigs a day, not paying the woman doing exactly the same job as the man next to her an equal wage – all traditions of the recent past.
Up next: it’s romantic. You are proving your love by taking his name. Is that so? Then how is he proving his love? Now, a name swap, I suggested that. Mark looked at me like I was mental. ‘Don’t be silly, I’m not changing my name,’ he said. Dead indignant. But me, I’m not supposed to be indignant at changing my name, I’m supposed to be romantic about it?
Finally, the fact that I’ll have a different name to the kids. The kids? What kids? Where have these bloody kids suddenly come from? No one, not me, not him, has ever mentioned the ‘K’ word up to now. If, and I stress if, we have kids, why not double barrel their name? Adams-Read. Read-Adams. Or if they’re girls, call them Read, and if they’re boys call them Adams. Other cultures deal with this – Spanish cultures, Italy – I think in some religions they do something with the woman keeping her name. But we must wipe out every trace of our former existence because ‘it’s just what you do.’
Never thinking I’d get married means I never thought through what it might mean. I always felt a bit uneasy when mates and people at work did it, but this has made me feel that, unlike the cake, I’m not tripling in value, I’m devaluing as a person. And what if we get divorced? I know I shouldn’t be thinking that now, but what if we do? I’ll hate him, either because he’s shagging someone else or because I’m shagging someone else, and I’ll still have to be called by his name. That’s just bloody absurd.
‘You can still be a Ms,’ he said, ‘but you’ll be Ms Adams not Ms Read.’
‘No, I won’t,’ I said. ‘No, I won’t.’
So, he laid down an ultimatum. He won’t marry me if I don’t change my name. He actually said that. Just before I left to get my dress fitted. If I don’t change my name, that’s it – wedding off.
God, this cake looks disgusting. I don’t want it. I’ve never really liked fruitcake. And anyway, I think I might have had enough.
If anyone asks if you’ve seen a Ms Sarah Read, tell them no. She no longer exists, she ran away to the circus, changed her name – because she wanted to. She’s now known as Sahara Red, the exotic dancer. Or she became an explorer, an astronaut, the second presenter on Great British Bake Off, a wedding planner. Say she disappeared.
Kim is a writer and academic who has two plays published by Aurora Metro (Project XXX and The Value of Nothing) and co-authored Scenes From the Revolution, published by Pluto Press, with playwright Billy Cowan, about 50 years of political theatre, 1968-2018. She has a range of short fiction and journal articles published, her main research area concentrating on using creativity for well-being, leading to her being a British Academic Innovation Fellow during 2022 and 2023.She lives in Greater Manchester with her husband (she didn’t change her name) and two sons.
Story illustration by FP – made with human and artificial intelligence.