On my way to a party in Ealing I saw a shop called Pan Rings. A mental image popped up of a saucepan with marks from milk round the sides. It is, in fact, a jewellery shop.
Fashion outlets happily attract attention with negative names. Nasty Gal was founded in 2012 and has I think been taken over by Boohoo. Nasty is a word that Swift used in poems of scatological curiosity. In one, Celia’s ‘basin takes whatever comes: / The scrapings of her teeth and gums, / A nasty compound of all hues, / For here she spits, and here she spews’. One of Swift’s resolutions for becoming old was: ‘Not to neglect decency, or cleenlyness, for fear of falling into Nastyness.’
Swift’s Celia might like the sportswear shop Sweaty Betty. Simon and Tamara Hill-Norton founded it in 1998.
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