My name is not Lain it is Iain. India Alpha India November not Lima Alpha India November.

I can forgive people writing my name as Ian. It’s the more common spelling and even if you know I use the variation you can instinctively write Ian, though admittedly I am significantly more forgiving of people who have never emailed or written to me before because they don’t have the correct spelling right there in front of them.

Lain, however, is infuriating. If you are even considering writing Lain you must have seen the correct name written down otherwise there’s no possible way you’d make the mistake. Writing my name as Lain tells me you aren’t paying me the simple courtesy of even noticing whom you are addressing.

The only way I can even imagine that you’d get it wrong is if you notice that a lowercase lima and an uppercase India may look similar or even identical in some fonts.

OK, fine. Let’s run with that. So you think that I write my forename all in lowercase, even though I write my surname with a leading capital, like every other English speaker. And since we already established that you must have seen other correspondence from me you must also have failed to notice that I also obey the usual rules of grammar in all my writing. Yet for some reason I write a lowercase l at the start of my name and for some other reason my email address has a lowercase i right where the l would have gone?

Besides, if you think Iain is an unusual name, just how many people called Lain do you know?

I didn’t think so.