There’s a game we sometimes play that purports to find out what your stage name should have been had you chosen a career as a porn-star.

You take the name of your first pet and your mother’s maiden name.

Put them together and you instantly sound as though you’re a seasoned street-walker, pole-dancer and burlesque diva rolled into one.

It works too – well, most of the time.

A thoroughly respectable editor and designer of my acquaintance discovered that, applying this formula, she was in possession of the wondrous soubriquet Trixie Goldsack, while my husband’s porn-star name is the highly plausible Lindy Stokes.

Only the other day we were lunching with a deputy headmaster who revealed that his alternative name was the splendid sounding Tuppence Golightly, which sounds for all the world like a good-time girl from the Music Halls or, perhaps, a particularly salacious Bond babe. I wonder what his pupils would have made of that?

Unfortunately, when it comes to naming pets, or indeed mothers, the magic formula, it seems, is not always very reliable.

The fact is that though the hit rate in the porn-star name game is astonishingly high (try it out), it doesn’t always work.

My own porn-star name for instance would be Marmaduke Tubb which, unless I was catering for an extremely dubious clientele, sounds more like a congenital idiot in a country house murder mystery than an alluring creature of erotic desire.

In cases like this it is better perhaps to switch to your classical accompanist name which involves taking your middle name and running it together with the name of the road you live in. Once again the results tend to be intriguingly appropriate.

As a child my husband would have been Nigel Claremont. Later the Claremont would have changed to Chetwynd, Aveley, Salisbury and various other names that would not look out of place on a classical music programme.

Sadly I don’t have a middle name, so I don’t really qualify for this. I don’t do too well on the roads front either. In fact my earliest classical accompanist name would have been Nothing B2068.