Why I legally changed my name five times

What kind of weirdo changes their name not once, but five times? Er, that would be me

My US passport, which I got by the skin of my teeth, with three days remaining.

Let me get one thing straight: I am not a fugitive. I have never committed a crime, unless you count a bit of thieving aged eight, or London Underground fare-dodging in my teens, or dabbling with a few recreational drugs in my teens and early twenties.

If I were a fugitive, I guess this is what they’d call ‘hiding in plain sight’.

But I honestly am not.

Nevertheless, I have changed my name five times. It wasn’t my full name each time: I’ve changed my first name twice and my surname five times. All for reasons which are above board and legal, but it’s still a strange thing to do.

So I thought I’d write about it, as things which are weird make good copy. I am very weird, so I make very good copy.

Don’t be like me, kids: have a boring life instead, it’s better for your mental health.

Anyhow, I’ve written about this before, so - full disclosure - this is a rare rewrite. Here goes…

Name change #1: 1998

My parents gave me the first name Ariane, after the heroine in a 1931 German film. They gave me the middle name Sherin, after my Indian grandmother (who I totally love), whose first name was Shirin. No idea why they didn’t spell my middle name Shirin like hers.

So basically, I was called Ariane Sherin ________. I spent my childhood desperate to cut off my birth surname, which I won’t tell you, partly because it identifies my mum and sister. But I got ribbed for it the whole way through school. It was just incredibly unglamorous - a faintly comical English surname which sounded preposterously unexotic next to Ariane and Sherin.

I also wanted to change my surname because it was my dad’s name, and he was a violent abuser, hitting me and my sister and threatening to hit my mum the whole way through my childhood. So by divorcing myself from his name, it felt as though I was distancing myself from him and wresting back some agency in life.

He could be a monster, but I still loved him. Me and Dad in 2009.

I decided to add an ‘e’ onto the end of Sherin as I thought it looked more symmetrical with Ariane. It also made it clearer that the name was pronounced ‘Shu-reen‘ rather than Sherrin. The thought of being Ariane Sherine made me feel like an exotic temptress, and I couldn’t wait for the day when I could legally change it.

Coincidentally, on my 18th birthday (3rd July 1998), I had the most boring job in the world, temping as a receptionist at a London firm of solicitors called Dibb Lupton Alsop. Clients would occasionally come in to sign documents, and I’d telephone the solicitor upstairs and ask him to come down to ‘do a swear’.

These were largely pre-internet days, so I couldn’t do this online. Instead, I’d had to travel to a legal stationery shop in London and purchase a blank document called a statutory declaration. I filled it in using a blue gel pen and took it in with me on my birthday. Then I phoned upstairs and asked the solicitor to come down and ‘do a swear’. He arrived, and barked, ‘Where’s the client?’

“I’m the client!” I announced, brandishing my statutory declaration. “It’s my 18th birthday and I want to change my name.”