The worst imaginable time to have to renew your mortgage would be now, but the second worst time was last week, when interest rates had already risen, but not all the way to here – and everyone knew they were shortly to go up again. Of course that’s when I did it, and it’s already pretty punishing. Right when everything was signed and sealed, I had a call from the mortgage adviser, wanting to know if, when I said I had never changed my name after getting married, I really meant that.
Well, yes: we had a whole big thing. I was prepared for my partner to change his name to mine, but, unfortunately, he has a real name of his own, and the first part is William. I was prepared to hyphenate, so he would be William Higham-Williams, which I thought sounded incredibly cool, like Ford Madox Ford. But for some reason he didn’t go for that either, so I exercised my ancient feminist right to carry on with my original, unoriginal surname.
