From: Floyd Scarabelli
Category: Amis
Date: 7/31/99
Time: 4:04:41 PM
Remote Name: 129.219.247.97
*NOT A NAME TO BE TRIFLED WITH* / BY TIM HULSE
I've lost count of the number of people who have drawn my attention to an article by Martin Amis in the Evening Standard last week. Ostensibly a piece about Tim Henman, it was in fact an entirely gratuitous attack on all people called *Tim*. Amis maintained that Henman is the first human being called Tim to achieve anything at all. "The name lacks all gravity", he wrote. "It's easy enough to see how it happened: the Tims of this world had all their ambitions crushed, all their aspirations dashed, by being called *Timmy* during childhood...The real puzzle is that the Tims do as well as they do, many of them leading reasonably active lives, holding down jobs, getting off with girls, and going on to have children of their own."
Actually I've never really minded being called *Timmy*. What I really can't stand is the middle-class twits who insist on calling me *Timbo*. Anyway, I obviously couldn't take this lying down, so I rang Amis to ask him what the hell he thought he was playing at. What about Timothy McVeigh, I said, the Oklahoma bomber? How many Martins have recently been convicted of mass murder? "Well, indeed", said Amis, showing no hint of contrition. "But that's a kind of negative achievement. I think that's a cry of rage from a Tim."
Sadly, Amis had not been besieged with phone calls from angry Tims. "But I've had some complaints at the tennis club", he said. "People mentioned Tim Mayotte and Tim Gullickson."
Amis's passion for tennis is well documented, and I wondered which he would rather be, given the choice: Wimbledon men's champion or the literary giant that he has become? "I think it would have been a very nice life to have been a sportsman, but I'll stick with what I've got", replied the novelist whose first name, I feel obliged to point out, rhymes with *farting*.
[From *The Independent* newspaper. June 29, 1997.]