When I went to boarding school I dropped the Adam and started using my middle name. I’m not sure whether this was my parents’ idea or mine, but I think it was a good one. There are five pages of Ryans in the Dublin phone book alone, but Adam is not a particularly common name, and the publicity was overwhelming (even in England: I used to scan furtively through the newspapers I was supposed to be using to light prefects’ fires, rip out anything relevant, memorize it later in a toilet cubicle before flushing it away). Sooner or later, someone would have made the connection. As it is, nobody is
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