If you enter life with a name like ‘Baron Ferdinand Friedrich Georg Ludwig von Wrangel’, then your dance card is somewhat marked, before you get a chance to miss your mouth with the first spoonful of potato porridge. Ferdinand von Wrangel was a Russian explorer and navigator with many accomplishments to his name. Not least a sense of facial hair humour.
There may have been times, between the ages of 8 and 10, when I would have swapped my surname for his. Fortunately by the time I was 10 I was just tall enough to deal with those who found my surname amusing and by the time I was 11 I think I did too. Have done ever since. Most versions of it anyway, there are still one or two that will have me instinctively swinging a left hook and threatening to stamp on your conkers.