Puzzlemaster

I THOUGHT that when the first series of Puzzle Panel had been broadcast that, until the new series came out in early 1999, that would be that. I could retire to the country and tend bees or whatever. Not a bit of it. Letters, e-mails and faxes continue to flood in to the BBC at Room 7058 of Broadcasting House, full of constructive criticism, remarks and suggestions for further puzzles.

Along with the forwarded correspondence, there is at long last a copy of the first indifferent review of the programme in a national newspaper. It made points about the programme and Radio 4 in general, but what first caught my eye was a reference to my name.

"I thought at first," said the reviewer, "that it was presented by someone called Christmas Lanka, but who turns out to be Chris Maslanka."

This idea is not new to me. I heard it the first day I attended the village school. It will no doubt be repeated in many of the listeners' letters. But something in the careless way this reviewer picks up my name and tosses it impertinently about in a national paper leaves me feeling oddly violated. I feel about my name being fixed on a little like one of those natives not wishing to be photographed in case the process somehow captures his or her soul.

You lucky person, I thought of the reviewer, called something unremarkable like Roland White. There's a name not to be conjured with. And White, is good, too. If not actually neutral, at least it's on the side of the angels.

The only time I remember even a slight embarrassment over the name White was long ago in Oxford when I met Halvard White, a brilliant Guyanan quantum theoretician and eccentric (he was rumoured to have lived for a while in a laundry cupboard and always wore glasses with one lens shattered and held together with an opaque mixture of plaster and sellotape, a system which must have impaired clear vision enough for it to be surprising that he had n0t shattered the other lens as well.

Halvard was ebony black in colour, and when he walked up to me, blinkingly, and held out a hand and said to me forcibly by way of introduction "Hello, I'm White," I'm afraid I proved unable to repress the response that entered my mind and I blurted out: "No you're not, you're black." Luckily he did not take this the wrong way, and went on to help me to understand several abstruse points about quantum physics.

People can be very sensitive about their names. A self-important Cambridge don called Oscar Browning once bounced up to Alfred Lord Tennyson, declaring "Hello, I'm Browning", at which the poet drew himself up to his full length and, looking down scornfully at the don, replied: "No you're not."

The tale makes for a good anecdote, but one cannot think it pleased Oscar Browning to be on the receiving end of it, and even less so that it was his own name that made it possible (If classical jokes aren't your thing, you can doctor the punch-line to read "I don't like gravy," say, to achieve much the same dramatic effect). But at least his name only occasioned this slight once, and he didn't have to suffer the same joke or misunderstanding day after day.

Still - as always- it could be worse. I have an Italian friend whose name is Vaccina - embarrassingly close to the Italian for something anatomical. As a result, whenever he introduces himself he makes little "I am injecting myself with a hypodermic syringe" movements with his hand and arm so that the listener seizes upon the notion of "vaccination" rather than anything else.

Nevertheless, in touching upon my name the reviewer has provided me with a starting topic for this first of many weekly columns: wordplay with names.

1. Of what other names is "Roland" an anagram?

2a. Rearrange the letters of "Alice"; b. "Amy"; and c. "Caroline" - in each case making a different name.

3. Of what guitarist is "Narcoleptic" an anagram?

4. What Longfellow character reads the same when his name is written vertically down the page in block capitals and viewed in a mirror?

5. Give a name in which each letter appears exactly twice.

6.Who started out life as Maurice Micklewhite?

7. Of whose name is "grow a penis" an unfortunate anagram?

8. Identify this politician from her anagram: "I'm an evil Tory bigot."

Answers next week