Here I must point out that Jeff Juke was the first sporting superhero I remember being mentioned when I was a little boy, and it was a long time before I discovered that his real name wasn’t Jeff Juke at all, but Geoff Duke. The error came about firstly because I didn’t know that there was a different – and commoner at that time – spelling of Jeff, and secondly because the local accent where I grew up did not recognise the letter ‘D’ when followed by one of those funny ‘U’s we have in English. You know, the ones that start with a hidden ‘y’ sound which is missing from words like dumb and dunderhead but present in duke and duel. (I expect it has an arcane name which people like me never learn because we’re not clever enough.) So where I came from, insulting a posh person was likely to get you challenged to a jewel, if you see what I mean. Geoff Duke, by the way, was a champion motorbike racer.
And I do realise that all this is very boring, which is why I haven’t rambled on about the fact that the German name Gottfried became Geoffroi in France and Godfrey in England, so Geoffrey is an Anglicization of a French name. I’m glad my brother never discovered that fact because he didn’t realise that the 100 Years War was over and considered the building of the Channel Tunnel a Very Bad Idea. He was eleven years older than me and would probably have deposited my little baby body in the nearest canal as soon as our mother told him what my name was.
What is perhaps a little less boring is the fact that I was perusing the display of newspapers in Sainsbury’s yesterday when a woman walked up alongside and selected a Daily Mail. That was scary.
But I’ll tell you what I find most interesting of all. This post was going to be about something completely different, but by the time I’d finished typing the above I’d forgotten what it was.
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