'And, finally, your address," said the American over the phone, and so I called out our house, village and county name. There came a pause: "Is that it?"
"Ah, yes."
"That's your entire address? Just four words!"
"Five, if you include Ireland."
"What about a postcode?"
"We don't have a postcode."
I might have told him that should he leave out the house name, the parcel he was sending would still probably arrive, since our village is not large. It's small, very small, so small that just the village name should be enough to guide the goods to my door. As far as I know, there is only one village of this name in Ireland.
I like the name of this place we've recently settled in. It's such an obvious kind of name. Many village and town names in Ireland are obscure or similar sounding translations from the Irish, but Riverstick is taken from the river Stick, so called because it's as straight as a, well, as a stick.
Like Keith Waterhouse's Maggie Muggins, I've had many, too many, addresses for one lifetime, but maybe that goes some way to explaining why I find place names and their origins fascinating.
I've lived in an estate called The Cloisters and a road called Church Road - both boringly self-explanatory. I've lived in another estate called Harbour View. Strictly speaking, the name didn't lie, but it wasn't exactly a view you could enjoy with a glass of wine in hand, friends around, barbecue a-sizzling. The truth is, you had to stand on top of the dressing table in the main bedroom to avail of it, and this really wasn't something I felt I could ask guests to do.
I've lived, too, in Connaught Street, which was not in Connaught at all, and in Moyne Road, which was far from Tipperary. Both, in fact, were in Dublin. Have you ever noticed that? How whole bits of Dublin are named after other parts of the country? Like that area off the North Circular Road where the names are all derived from Kerry: Muckross, Kenmare, Derrynane, Valentia.
Who was the person, for surely it was just one person, who chose these names, and then decided to end them not with the more common "Street" or "Road", but with the more posh sounding Parade? Derrynane Parade. Muckross Parade. Fancy! There's much to infer about this person. Can we assume it was a displaced Kerry person, but a successful one, one who was a wee bit lonesome perhaps, and who was rather pretentious by nature?
And, just a stone's throw from this Kerry enclave are streets named after people, but just their first names. Who was the Leo who was so dear to the developer that he named a street after him? And Josephine, who was she? And did Josephine Avenue and Leo Street know each other? We shall never know.
On a more global scale, I like the way names were carried from the old world to the new - Ranelagh in Tasmania, the many Dublins throughout the world. Once I visited friends who lived on Batman Street in a town called Portarlington in the State of Victoria, Australia. This particular Batman wasn't the masked hero of our screens but the son of a convict who'd "done good". So, let's see, the street named after this John Batman was in a new town named after an old Irish town, in a state named after an English monarch, in a country whose name is derived from the Latin Australis, meaning "Southern". How many layers of history is that? How many stories?
Few of us get to name whole countries, or towns, or streets even, but many of us do get to name our own house, and what a lot that can tell about our personalities and our circumstances. There's a large middle-class area in Cork city dating back to the 1960s where most of the houses are named after beauty spots in England and Scotland. Why? Don't you know, Scotland and England were all the rage, darling, for honeymoons back then. St Kilda. Inverness. Katrine. Now the honeymoons may be long over, but there are memories, more than one honeymoon baby I'm sure, and the name plates.
And then there are those who use the name of their house to tell a whole story. Yet, Dun Roamin' would be the perfect name for our house if it wasn't already named. You see, we've done our roaming, we're staying put, stuck here in the Riversticks and more than happy to be so.
Anne-Marie Forrest's latest book, Love Potions, is published by Poolbeg, €10.99