As a child, I became curious about the meaning of my Christian name and though I searched and searched, I could never find it anywhere. It was my mother who was responsible for christening me ‘O’Neil,’ she absolutely loved the name when she rst heard it but – as circumstance would have it – so did quite a few other new mothers the same year I was born. Rather than have her son be lost amongst the sea of variations: Oneal, Oniel and of course the most popular Oneil, she decided to use the spelling usually associated with the surname. Because of this I never did nd my name in any of the baby name books but I did nd Neil which means ‘champion’ and the ‘O’ with an apos- trophe, I also found out, means ‘son of’ so by default my name means Son of a Champion.