In the nickname stakes, One-Pint Willy has nothing on 3-60 Geoffrey Cow

As nicknames go, One-Pint Willy just about scrapes a C for effort. The moniker conferred on Prince William by Mike Tindall speaks cheekily to an apparently amusing fact about the future king’s inability to hold his drink, and it rolls nicely and alliteratively off the tongue. Old One-Pint can probably see the funny side of it – especially after a couple – but Tindall nonetheless apologised for letting it slip.

Really, though, Tindall ought to be sorry for not having come up with something more imaginative. True, it’s better than Walesy, which is what our next monarch might have been called if he was in a cricket team, or The Willy King (football bants), but only by a bit.

In fairness, most nicknames are pretty dumb, often a product of men’s emotional immaturity or general inability to respect anyone else sufficiently to use their actual name. So ingrained are they in the male sporting psyche, that nicknames are more or less a prerequisite in certain arenas – think darts (Luke the Nuke) or snooker (Rocket Ronnie). But that doesn’t usually make them any better.

I’ve had some terribly unoriginal nicknames over the years. For a while at primary school, I was known as Shakespeare, seemingly because I and the Bard were the only two Williams my classmates were aware of (One-Pint being a few years younger). At secondary school I was Tex for a bit, and then at sixth form college people started calling me Al – my namesake was VP at the time. When I was dragooned onto the college darts team at university, I became the Linton Lover-Lover, which at least was intriguing – though much more suggestive than any reality.

For the most part, nicknames that derive directly from a person’s name may be endearing, but they are not impressive. Those which state the obvious can be hit or miss. A lad at school wore tinted glasses to help visual processing issues associated with dyslexia and was consequently known by everyone as Shades (or sometimes Shard-des). I still chuckle over it. But Lofty for a tall person? I mean, come on.

The funnier sobriquets are generally those that require a little explanation. A friend unwisely told us that as a child she’d been known as Poofoot among her family because of her unfortunate habit of stepping in dog crap. The nickname duly achieved a revival. Another former schoolmate became known as Hingis at university because he looked a bit like Martin from the Nineties sitcom Game On, and two steps on, the name stuck. In turn, he dubbed one of his pals Squaddie because he had previously been in the Air Cadets.

But if even these efforts leave you feeling somewhat cold, there may be hope among the younger generation of better nicknames to come. I say this with confidence, having been told by my eight-year-old that one of his friends now answers to Mr Pigeon, the name resulting from an incident in which he kicked a football out of the playground in such a wonderful arc that it seemed to be flying. Apparently, so fond has he become of the epithet that he refuses to respond to anything else.

This is not the half of it, however, as another boy in my son’s year has the nom de guerre, “3-60 Geoffrey Cow”. Initially, I misheard this tag and thought the boys in year 4 were making some sort of political point about their mate and a long-gone former chancellor of the Exchequer. Yet having recognised my error and grilled my son on the name’s origins, I am little the wiser, with the reasoning for this remarkable label already lost in the mists of time (ie year 3).

Not that the unknown derivation reduces the name’s power. If anything, it merely serves to underscore its mysterious absurdity. Maybe the boy is good at spinning in a circle? Perhaps he farms in his spare time? Or possibly he looks like the old fella off Rainbow. But I do know one thing: you can keep the future king’s nickname, for instead we must hail the nickname king – long live His Majesty, 3-60 Geoffrey Cow!