OH, IT’S like someone throwing a pebble down a well and the sound of the echo bouncing back up.’

That’s how an airy-fairy art teacher once described my name as sounding like. She said it to me in front of 30 other classmates in a new school.

Embarrassed? Oh, just a little bit.

I always hankered after a more hard-bitten name. Like Rock Le Sauvage. Or should it be Rocq Le Sauvage?

That was the nickname given to me 15 years ago by – if my memory serves me correctly, which it often doesn’t these days – Homer Constantine, which was a helluva name for a roofer from the south-west region.

‘I know what’ll be a good pseudonym for you, Shaun,’ he said as we worked on a flat roof up the Grange.

His personal roofing assistant, Ian, didn’t know what a pseudonym was, but grinned a gap-toothed smile anyway.

‘What would that be, Homer?’ said I, clambering up the ladder with a roll of felt on my shoulder.

‘Rock Savage,’ he said.

‘What about Rock Le Sauvage, it’d be more Guernsey.’

And that was it. The name stuck for a while.

Homer is just another one who has gone down in my personal history of people with unusual and memorable names.

Everyone has one. One day you’re just wandering around, minding your own business, when all of a sudden you know someone with an unusual name.

School is often the best starting point as it happens at the beginning of your life and is the perfect springboard for collecting unusual names.

First up there was Julius Trout and his best mate, Lloyd Buckle. They may sound like a pair of fops from a P. G. Wodehouse novel, perhaps old university chums of Bertie Wooster who between them held the record for knocking off policeman’s helmets. But they weren’t. They came from Bracken Bank, a huge council estate that made the Bouet before its makeover look like the Blue Peter Italian sunken garden.

Julius was a big fan of the King and had decorated his £2.99 Willis Ludlow patchwork leather jacket (we all had one) with pointy metal studs. Unfortunately he wasn’t very good at spacing and he started running low on studs halfway through, so it read EL Vis.

That, coupled with his shortness and black, slicked-back hair, made him look like a Mexican Elvis impersonator.

It must have been hard growing up in our town being of mixed race. It must have been even harder being a clarinet player. Harder still if you had an almost Wildean sensibility and aesthetic outlook on life. And it must have been nigh on damn impossible to have had all this and be called Gerard Fontaine.

I really hope that he made it.

Coming from our town, it was inevitable that you would get huge clumps of people who sounded as if they came straight from a Charlotte Bronte novel. Mathew Lamb and Brennan Lambert were obvious candidates for gamekeepers knocking round Thrushcross Grange but Linton Sedgwick was definitely a past lodger at Wuthering Heights.

Then you would get names that sounded funny if you thought about them for long enough. It helped if the name’s owner was a legendary nutter, too.

Zippy was one such lad.

Like any other 60s-built comprehensive school, ours had vast acres of flat roof on which were lost dozens of balls: footballs, tennis balls, golf balls, bouncy balls … even the odd beach ball in summer.

Zippy had the idea to shimmy up a drainpipe one night with a bin liner, collect all the balls he could find and sell them the next day at school.

He was half-way through this bold endeavour when he was spotted by the caretaker. Typical of school kid legend, the caretaker yelled: ‘Oi, you!’

Zippy panicked, ran and jumped off the gymnasium roof, crashed to the ground and shattered both legs, and even when the caretaker walked up to him, Zippy was crawling along the tennis courts shouting: ‘Y’can’t catch me.’

Zippy’s real name? Darren Beardshaw. It’s not that funny until you realise there’s Robertshaw, Bradshaw, Kershaw and even Culshaw. But when did a form of facial hair make it into a name?

Likewise, Christian names can throw up a few funnies.

I was in the school rugby team and I remember going to the noticeboard with Dave Street (Dibbie) to see if we’d been picked for Saturday’s game.

The names read: David Alderslade, Simon Barr, David Dixon, Ian Holmes (captain), David Kettlewell, Timothy Littlewood, David McInnis, Nigel Morris, Colin Moses, Dale Ogden, Shaun Shackleton [I had], Martin Simpson, Stephen Simpson, David Street [he had], Jason Taylor and two subs, Paul Cook and David Cook [not related].

Russell Daniels, the school swot and Young Ornithologist of the Year three years running, was pinning up the latest Chess Club fixtures.

He glanced at the team sheet and said, to no one in particular: ‘Taking this list as a rudimentary consensus, it’s depressingly obvious that back in 1965, roughly 33% of parents in Keighley and its surrounding districts didn’t actually care that their male offspring would grow up to be called Dave.’

Dibbie looked at him.

‘What are you trying to say?’

‘Simply that you have each adhered rigidly to such innate unoriginality and found yourselves thus’ – Daniels swept his hand over the team sheet – ‘at the very pinnacle of your individual and collective excellence. Rugby union.’

Dibbie looked at him again and pleased at hearing the word, ‘excellence’, patted him on the back and said: ‘Oh, reight. Cheers, mate.’

Also at school were Robert Johnson (king of the delta slide blues guitarists – not), Jane ‘Arthur’ Scargill, Shirley Eccles ‘Cake’, Barry Darling and the truly and astoundingly named Troy Brady (who else but Irish parents on a council estate would have the pride, conviction and pure audacity to name their son after the legendary Greek city at the centre of the Trojan War, as described in the Epic Cycle by the poet Homer?).

Which all goes to answer the question, ‘what’s in a name?’, with: ‘Everything and nothing’.

For my sins, I was born a Tostevin and after my mother married and my father adopted me, my name changed to Shackleton.

Of all the folk to marry, she chose someone with a surname alliterative to my first name.

But in many ways it has served me well. Tostevin, one of – if not the – finest surnames ever, may not have gone down that well in West Yorkshire.

‘Tossed a what?’ I could imagine some of the pond life saying. This would have soon morphed into Tosser and God knows what else. So Shackleton was the perfect disguise.

‘Are you a relation?’ some people ask.

‘Excuse me?’ I always say.

‘Are you a relation?’

‘Actually, yes I am,’ I say. Because I am.

Not of Sir Ernest Shackleton, the famous polar explorer (whom they mean), but of Carol Shackleton, my mother, and Vanessa Shackleton, my sister (whom I mean).

And with snotty, smart-alec comments like that, it would be no surprise if an echoing pebble was some day replaced by my own voice screaming in a well after someone had chucked me in.