Being Julia

When you are a small child, you accept who you are and you accept your name.  You never question if you are who you want to be or whether your name properly represents you.  As you become a teenager that all changes.  You believe that you can choose your identity. In my fifties I have those feelings again.  I want to cut my hair off and die it pink and reinvent myself.  Maybe I could even change my name.

I've always been a reader and it was books that made me want to keep my name.  At a time when the country was filled with little girls called Susan, Tracey, Sarah, Sharon and Julie, Julia was thought of as being a little bit different. Teachers would say, "Oh, Julia, that's a bit unusual, where does that come from?"  I would shrug my shoulders and not care.

Then I became a teenager and I wanted to give a romantic answer to the question.  I would have liked to have said, "Oh yes, I'm named after Julia in 1984. You know Winston Smith's lover.  She was a survivor." After I read Brideshead Revisited I really wished I'd been named after Lady Julia Flyte. Of course I did.  She was beautiful and fierce. I loved her. I'd had to look up the word languid when reading this as a description of her and then went around practising being languid to the point where a boy asked me if I was alright because I was walking so slowly.

In truth, my mum wanted to call me Julie because everyone was called Julie but my Aunt and Uncle beat her to it.

If I'd been American then I might have aspired to cookery and modelled myself on Julia Childs.
In 2007 Julia was the 10th most popular name in America, probably because of the popularity of the lovely Julia Roberts.

In my fifties when I'm having another identity crisis I realise that I don't have the survival instinct to be the Julia in 1984, am not beautiful enough to be the Julia in Brideshead Revisited, can't cook well enough to be Julia Childs and being Julia Roberts is out of reach of any mortal.

Twitter brought another Julia to my attention.

Julia Hartley-Brewer is a journalist who has been on Question Time and politics shows as a newspaper reviewer.  She's the kind of woman that makes the Long Suffering Husband shout at the telly.  She's all pearls, nice hair with an expensive red tint to it, plummy laughter and a staggering disregard for anyone other than herself.

She tweeted.

It was a tweet that shocked me. It shocked lots of people on Twitter.  I thought it was odd to be proud of making someone feel sad.  She justified it by claiming that he was forcing his political opinions on her and that she hadn't been rude.  I was expecting everyone to reply to all of her future tweets (forcing her political opinions on us) with "I couldn't care less." I wasn't expecting just how much abuse she would take. Someone who I think is normally quite fair wrote a blog, imagining how her day would normally go.  It was brutal  (and quite funny) but I couldn't help thinking that I really wouldn't want to be that Julia at the moment.  It had briefly flitted through my mind to try on the personality of this woman that makes the LSH throw things and then I realised that I need to get a grip and remember it's just a name.