Watching the Queen getting married on the tele last night (just fleetingly I promise and out of the corner of my eye) I was reminded of a friend of ours who went to Scotland to teach in a Primary School in the early seventies.
He found himself initially extremely confused by the accent and was intrigued by the excitement of the people in the class who were entered for something they called the Chooky Embra.
He was well into the year before he discovered this was an award sponsored by, and called after the Queen’s husband.

His second difficulty arose when a new child came into school one morning and announced that his name was Gooey.

No amount of guess work could translate this for the teacher.

When the child’s mother arrived to collect her son he nervously said to her
“What is his name”
“Gooey” she reaffirmed brightly.
“Its very unusual ” said my friend “How do you spell it ?”
“Oh” she said “it is lovely isn’t it, I read it in a novel,
Its G-u-y, Gooey!”

What fascinates me about that story is the possibility that there is yet on the streets of Glasgow a man, now in his early forties, who answers, happily, to the name Gooey.