I once rather stupidly asked a woman who was screaming death threats down the phone at me, if she would mind not,  at the same time, calling me ‘darling’ as I found the mixed messages slightly confusing.

“You can call me Liz or Ms Davies,” I suggested as I tried to convince her that we were not ‘well out of order’ for publishing details of her  criminal conviction.

“How about I just call you a **&*!!  *&##?” she replied putting to an end my mixed message conundrum once and for all.

In fairness I couldn’t really argue because I had told her she could call me anything other than ‘darling’ so all I could do was sit in silence as with one final curse on my house, she hung up.

Her suggestion was one in a long list of things I been called over the years from people getting my name wrong - Lix, Liz Tindle, Liz David are the most frequent - to the eye opening moniker bestowed by an obviously distracted former colleague who burst into my office one morning and greeted me - to his clear horror as the words fell from his mouth as his brain tried in vain to prevent them - as his ‘little love cake’!

We had a serious conversation about what was appropriate within the confines of the workplace as I tried desperately to control my laughter at his clear discomfort.

The first person to ever call me Liz - before I hit secondary school and my name was shortened for ever - was a an elderly aunt who lived at the time in Linda Vista and always used the name, which in her cut-glass accent sounded wonderful to me and filled my maternal grandmother with horror.

“Her name is Elizabeth,” she would counter every time she heard the name.

“Well I like Liz,” Auntie Evelyn would reply with a twinkle in her eye, knowing the stir it would cause.

The most enduring name I have however is the family nickname bestowed on me by my sister almost 50 years ago when she struggled with the name Elizabeth and dubbed me Bup. In return I called her Bong - a reference to Ali Bongo the popular comedy magician of the 1970s.

They are both names which have stuck and frequently raise eyebrows when The Mother announces ‘here come Bup and Bong’ when we turn up anywhere.

It was only this week when listening to the author Michael Rosen speaking on the BBC about language and its eccentricities that I discovered the science behind how the name probably came about when he suggested that toddlers often only pick up the last syllable of a long word when they’re learning to speak which explains why ‘Elizabeth’ quickly morphed into Bup and stuck.

It probably explains why I always called my grandmother - on my father’s side - Banna. Apparently - being from the posh end of Blaina- she always expected to be called Grandma unlike my mother’s mother, who was delighted to be a Nanna!

Unable to get my tongue around the longer name, she was dubbed Banna, a name taken up by my sister and hated by our grandparent until the day she died. It’s a shame she wasn’t still around so I could have explained to her that it really wasn’t persona and far better than some of the alternatives her granddaughter has endured!