Indeed it's often a difficult task to find a suitable name for something. Whether it be your newest invention, your new theatre group, your latest Human child or new band project.
Although there is the argument, perhaps more applicable to bands rather than the naming of children, that really the name is immaterial - if you think about the name of one of the most successful and ground breaking bands of our age you could, after taking quite a few philosophical steps back, ponder on the quality and inventiveness or invocativeness (I think it's not yet a word) of the name 'The Beatles'. Yet somehow it doesn't matter as we associate the name with the genius and talent of the four from Liverpool. I'm sure many will disagree with my blasphemy - I can already imagine the shouts of angry protest. I'm not saying it's a rubbish name, I don't actively dislike it - it's really just subjective. I believe there's a new film out where people having no historical memory of the band in the fictional alternative reality, pooh-pooh the creative ideas that in our version of reality were explored and are now widely celebrated.
Even so, usually we do like to try our best to find the perfect name for our object of love and affection, whether it be an art project or the fruit of our loins. And for our new project it was no different. For many months we threw ideas around, occasionally rejoicing all too early that we had found the perfect name, only after having courted the idea for a while, dismissing it along with the many other unsuccessful suitors vying for the honour of giving the new entity a tag.
One of which was, believe it or not and in almost complete honesty a name so similar to the one we finally fell for that it could beggar belief.
The Long Dining Society - inspired by various kopf kinos (German for 'internal head cinema', i.e. fantasy) of evening functions dragged to as a child by parents that seemingly went on forever, the conversations of utterly no interest (even when we did understand what was being discussed), or of a more civilised way of communally sharing a meal as the Italians tend to do, taking their time over many delicious courses and delicacies, or perhaps merely a purely greed based society where there is not so much a practice of breaks set throughout the day during which to dine, but rather short breaks between eating in order to allow the gastronomical internal workings a respite.
This was probably almost the name that we might have taken - indeed it would have been a good one I'm sure - and after all, in the end, if the material or art is of a sufficient standard then how much does the name really matter. Hell, why not take the name 'The Folkles' (pronounced Folk-Ulls)?
But in the end we did settle for something slightly different. And so in this version of reality we became 'The Lone Dining Society'.
We are very grateful for the article in the SZ (Süddeutsche Zeitung) on the leader of the project. This is just a humourous and comradical (also not yet a word) friendly jibe at the unfortunate misspelling. We don't mind at all - rumour has it that Ian has a lively sense of humour.
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