What's in a name?

I see on the BBC news site that the drowned village of Stourhead Gardens has finally been located by divers. The team found a couple of cottages, and stone walls. They even bought up stone with paint on it.

In my teens I used to go out some evenings with friends to a pub called 'The Bull' at a place called 'Three-Legged Cross'. We played bar-billiards there. It was a small, quiet pub, with only a few other people in it, who weren't bothered that we were possibly under-age.

A few years later, the Bewl Bridge reservoir was created near Lamberhurst, and after the damming and the filling-up, 'The Bull' was under forty feet of water. I sailed over it some time ago in a dinghy when I met up with my sister and her husband for an outing in Kent. It was appropriate, they were often with me in the pub as we raced to get as many balls pocketed before the bar clacked down and they would stop coming back.

I have often wondered about diving down to find the pub and peer through the windows to see of the bar-billiards machine was still there. The village of Three-Legged Cross, now drowned, was so-called because it was situated on a cross-roads that had only three arms to it, by the way. But it sounds much better than calling it T-junction. Names are far more important that you first realise.

I don't know who the architect of the Bewl Bridge reservoir was, but the Stourhead lake was created by Capability Brown. That's the way to choose a name for yourself, no-one's going to boast at the dinner table that thier garden was created by Snoop Doggy Dog or Sin with Sebastian.

I've finally found out what I am, after three or four weeks of slashing brambles and ripping out nettles. I was walking back down the lane yesterday morning towards the orchard when a car pulled up and a woman hopped out to deliver a newspaper to one of the cottages. I had to laugh because she was in her slippers. We chatted for a while, and after I said what I was doing, she asked me if I was a 'Jobbing Gardener'. I paused, thinking about all the unfortunate connotations my mind could make, and then said guardedly that I might be.

"I know a couple of people who are looking for someone to do some work for them," she said, and so I decided that I might be a Jobbing Gardener, after all. It has the sort of feel to it that makes me think of The Battle of Epping Forest, but I've put that to the back of my mind.

So now I need a name. How about Hackability Smith? Or Slasher Jones? My favourite at the moment is Billhook Bowles.