My own #RoyalBaby
My life, carefully loosened from its potted presence in York, was last month uprooted and returned to its home ground in the Ceiriog Valley of North East Wales.
I've moved back home properly now, and to show it I've made a special 12-month commitment: buying a car.
I say 12 months because A) it won't last any longer, and B) I'll be damned if I'm not in London in 12 months time, where even the chinquiest Chinquecento is an expensive inconvenience.
Like Kate and Wills, I have a new member of the family I have to carefully look after (don't let it roll over, don't leave in a ditch etc). But unlike #royalbaby, my car does not yet have a name.
Let's not get ahead of ourselves though, you haven't even met him/her (how does one tell?). My new purchase is a 1998 Nissan Micra, three doors, and red as an old drunkard's nose, with 81,000 on the clock. The engine is an understated 1.0 litre, but sweet as a nut as Mr Wormwood would say, and is in fact the banger of choice for the young rally drivers of Wrexham, Shropshire and Flintshire.
That said, insurers don't seem to have caught on, and I got a decent comprehensive deal from Diamond that includes as named drivers me, my dad, my mum, my sister, and my dog.
The 1000cc Belly of the Beast
Enthusiastically noisy and 15 years of age, it would probably be blaring out Taylor Swift had it any choice in the matter. But the stereo has long since been ripped asunder, and they are never, ever, ever getting back together.
Perhaps then a fitting name would reflect this castrated status. Gelding, or The Eunuch.
In fact, among the heady list of 6 Famous Eunuchs of history is Sporus, who emerged from the shadows of the ancients in 65AD, when Roman Emperor Nero decided to ignore his own laws by castrating and then marrying him, after the Emperor kicked his own pregnant wife to death.
Sporus was given his own 'Mistress of Wardrobe', and was paraded about the city with Nero, dressed in the attire of an Empress.
It can't have been a happy marriage, because three years later Nero topped himself, presumably to the delight of one acerbic Roman who was quoted by Suetonius to have quipped 'The world would have been better off had Nero's father married someone more like the castrated boy'.
Sporus was undeterred however, and continued his gold-digging through Nymphidius Sabinus, who made an unsuccessful bid for emperor, Emperor Otho, subsequently killed by his enemies, and the dastardly Emperor Vitellius. This was to be his last affair, as he committed suicide to avoid Vitellius' command for him to be dressed as a woman and raped for the enjoyment of the crowds at the halftime of a gladiator match.
Ironically, Sporus is derived from the ancient Greek word 'spora', meaning 'seed, sowing'.
Of course, all of this is to be taken with a pinch of salt, says historian David Woods, who in an academic journal argues that Nero only married Sporus to humiliate and outflank him as a potential rival to the throne.
One thing is for sure: for a castrati, the man sure had big balls.
Of course, all this hasn't got us very far in the way of naming my car. We could try tying in another thread, namely the Micra's Japanese provenance.
There is a dark anime novel by Rieko Yoshihara called Ai no Kusabi, written in the nineties and televised as an animated series, about a dystopian city with a caste system based on hair colour.
As you can see, domination is a major theme, as well as hilarious levels of homoeroticism. The lowest of the castes are 'furniture' - castrated, dark haired men who serve in the houses of the 'blondies'. One such armoire is Katze, a protagonist in the novel and cartoon. There's a name.
Alternatively, I could just call it the Hackmobile, or really push the boat out and go for the #Hackmobile, where 'hashtag' is spoken in the way that some insufferable people do, along with 'lol' and 'omg'.
If you have any suggestions, complete with a long-winded and debauched backstory, let me know. The longer, and the more debauched, the better.