ERROL PARKER | Editor-at-large | Contact
“Even the guy who shit his pants in P.E. back in Year 7 got a nickname,” he said.
“Mind you, it wasn’t one you’d want but he ended up owning it. Meanwhile, I’ve tried my best to be pleasant, kind and nice to everyone in the cohort. I get good marks, not the best but I’m certainly not going to be going to a regional university,”
“What did I do wrong? Why didn’t I get a nickname? Maybe I was too nice to everyone?”
George Robinson is far less frequent in the minds of his fellow students than it is on the Whooton Academy’s honour roll.
Though everyone in his small year group knows his name, knows that his father is a mildly popular solicitor in town and his mother, Dorothy, left them both for a handsome Noosa-based tennis coach.
They know he’s handy cricketer and a utility tri-code back.
But that’s about it.
Friends of the 18-year-old refer to him only as George – not even a humourous prefix such as ‘Boy’ or a witty suffix like ‘Michael’.
To them, he’s just another smiling face in the sea of well-built painfully-middle-class gentlemen that flood the hallways of the South West’s most exclusive school for boys.
Speaking candidly to The Advocate, one of George’s home-class friends detailed why they hadn’t bothered giving him a nickname.
“Some people are just born with the right name,” said Ralph Greenholm, who was christened ‘Radar’ in Year 7 because of his giant ears that stick out like the extended mirrors on a grey nomad’s Pajero.
“And George is one of those people. You just look at him and think ‘George’ and that’s it. It’s older brother Randolf got ‘Rah Rah’ because of his initials. That and he had a poster of Jason Little above his bed for 6 years,”
“Not that George is a bad guy at all, in fact, he’s quite nice. But yeah, that’s about the gist of it.”
More to come.
