Wheelistically @ Claire.NU

Twenty-four years ago today, I was born.

Appar­ently, it was snow­ing when I was born.

I know this not because the snow itself was par­tic­u­larly worthy of note, or because the fact it was snow­ing was in any way out of the ordin­ary; it was just days into Feb­ru­ary, after all. I know this because my Mum, whose mild obsess­ive com­puls­ive traits make her ter­ribly prone to repeat­ing things, would begin every birth­day morn­ing there­after with “Just think, this time ‘X’ years ago it was snowing!”

So, there was snow on the 6^th of Feb­ru­ary, 1985.

And 4 pounds and 3 ounces of little me, as of four minutes past three in the after­noon. Or was it three minutes past four? I can never remem­ber. Still, given I was born at barely 31 weeks gest­a­tion, I doubt a 59 minute dis­crep­ancy makes much difference.

Today, there’s still snow (albeit, slushy dregs) and there’s still me (albeit con­sid­er­ably bigger).

The fol­low­ing little video, whilst being rather apt, has a bit of a story behind it:

Accord­ing to frag­men­ted pieces of inform­a­tion I have gathered from both of my par­ents, my name­sake is said to be Clare Grogan, the lead singer of 1980’s New Wave group Altered Images. It was appar­ently Dad’s idea (and one, we sus­pect, fuelled by the fact that he fan­cied Grogan off the telly after see­ing her on Top Of The Pops, or something).

At his sug­ges­tion of “Clare”, Mum agreed on the basis that she simply liked the name (and it seems wasn’t too bothered about its iffy ori­gin) and so Clare was then placed on a list of baby names con­cocted prior to my birth; the other names included: Leanne, and Andrew, should I have been a boy.

My par­ents never got a chance to decide on a ‘final’ name on account of me rather rudely turn­ing up 2 and a half months earlier than expec­ted. After being birthed, I was whisked away to the SCBU and put on a life sup­port machine. Mum was to be (under­stand­ably) rather over­whelmed and exhausted at this point and whilst being pestered by my very excited Dad as to what they should name me, she briefly lost the will and replied “Oh, I don’t care!”.

Dad mis­heard and thought Mum had said “(Oh, why not) CLARE!” and rushed to tell the midwife.

Mum was a bit miffed after­wards, “Oh, so you’ve named her, then.”

The spelling of my name (with the addi­tion of the i) was cour­tesy of the nurse/midwife who quickly scrawled my name on the vari­ous rel­ev­ant labels. As my birth was no doubt a par­tic­u­larly fraught and pan­icked affair, I don’t think the lady was too bothered about the finer points of my par­ents’ pre­ferred spelling.

How­ever, once things had calmed down and my par­ents had noticed the dif­fer­ent spelling used, they decided they liked “Clare with an i” much bet­ter any­way and so never bothered to men­tion the “mistake”.

I daren’t think about what I might have been named if Mum’s reply had been a bit stronger…