My mother wanted to name her first daughter Attracta, but the tradition was to name babies after family names. When she gave birth to me - her third daughter - in the bedroom with the bay-window above the kitchen, she insisted, despite a lot of opposition, on having her choice of name.

The story goes that as my dad carried me out of the house to be baptized, he said: "As she was born on the Feast Day of St. Peter & Paul, we'll put Pauline with it; and she'll like it better when she grows up.

" His words proved prophetic because when I went to school in London, I got a lot of teasing about it, so I decided to use the moniker that my dad gave me. St.

Attracta was a sixth century Irish Saint from County Sligo. She founded a hostel for travellers and worked with the homeless.

Her Feast Day is August 11. A school in Tubbercurry, County Sligo, and one in Dublin are named after her.

In September 2019, the Irish airline Aer Lingus named airbus A321LR 'Attracta'. Some of the titles in this collection are from assignments at a writer's club to which I belonged for many years.

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