David Shingler's Stream of Consciousness

It’s no big secret and/or it’s easy to connect where the name ‘Shingler’s List’ came from. My name is David Shingler. My surname sounds very similar to that of Oskar Schindler (1908-1974), a man who is recognised for having saved the lives of 1,200 Jews during the Holocaust by hiring them to work at his ammunition and enamelware companies in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and occupied Poland. He is the subject of the novel ‘Schindler’s Ark’ but more commonly known by the movie adaptation ‘Schindler’s List’, directed by Steven Spielberg.

The movie was released in 1993 with it’s VHS release coming in late 1994. It would make it’s television debut in 1997. These years were my year five to year nine school years and the movie was fresh in everybody’s mind. This is where the taunting began.

I was one of four children that moved from my junior school to high school so making new friends was a necessity. For a short while, when asked my name, I could get away with just saying Dave; but then the teachers would use my full name and the questions started. “What’s your second name?” “It’s Shingler.” “Shingler? Have you got a list?!” Hilarity ensued (this is sarcasm, obviously).

For years I was greeted with the same old questions – How’s your list coming along? Have you got a list? Saved any Jews recently? – along with people purposely getting my name wrong. Luckily, I never saw this as anything more than jokes, just a bit of banter, and even when it wasn’t I was thick skinned enough to just brush it off. It did get really old, really fast though!

Leaving school and going into college, university and employment, it would happen periodically but it eventually faded away. That was until 2015 when I decided to start a podcast. The show had no set topic, it would just be a conversation about things going on at that moment in time in our lives. I’d jot a few notes down about topics that I wanted discuss, one may say that I made a list, and then I put it to the masses asking ideas for a name. It didn’t take long for the old joke to pop up again, “You could call it Shingler’s List”, said like it was the first time I’d ever heard it. It was annoying but it annoyingly worked! It was time to own it.

I’m in a position now nine years on from starting the Shingler’s List venture where things have plateaued. Subscriptions have levelled out, engagement on social media has dropped and I’ve started cutting back on things I produce. I closed my YouTube channel and stopped making videos for Instagram. I post less often to my socials and have recently started to evaluate whether I want to keep my accounts active. What I do know is that the name ‘Shingler’s List’ doesn’t really do me any favours with it’s links to the very serious subject of the Holocaust, especially in this day and age where offence is the problem of the offender and not the offended. If I want my show to grow then a rebrand may be essential. But do I want it to grow? Only I can answer that.

For now I’m happy to continue with what I’m doing under this name. I know my friends and close followers across my socials know that it comes from a good place and is a light hearted dig at myself for having a somewhat peculiar name.

Photo by Alam Kusuma on Unsplash