"It's always mildly humiliating to have a name like Tim used on you. It sounds deliberately belittling even when that is not the person's intention. But it's always deliberate on my part: whenever I meet someone called Tim, I use their name as much as I can: Hi, Tim! How are things, Tim? So tell me, Tim, what have you been up to, Tim? It feels good to offload a bit of that humiliation on to somebody else. It may sound callous, but in my experience everyone named Tim does this."
"Some days later, on a cold and rainy morning, I am drinking a latte I made myself, in my own kitchen, with the middle one sitting next to me. We are both silent, both staring at our laptops, and both holding our feet up in the air to stop the tortoise biting our toes. I've tried giving the tortoise some lettuce, but he's ignored it in favour of rampaging between the chair legs in search of human flesh."
A traveller stops at a coffee shop next to a petrol station north of Brighton after a band's autumn tour and seeks coffee before heading home. A barista asks for a name, prompting a humorous reflection on the narrator's relationship with the name Tim and a deliberate habit of using it to offload mild humiliation. Days later the narrator drinks a homemade latte at home beside a bandmate, both distracted by laptops while keeping feet aloft to prevent a tortoise from biting toes. Attempts to placate the tortoise with lettuce fail as it rampages, and a dog later eats the tortoise's lettuce.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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