THE TROUBLE with people named "Don" is that there are too many of them. About 63,029,735 at last count, give or take seven and not including renegade Mafiosi still waiting for their newly forged passports, the odd Spanish grandee or the occasional progeny of wacko New Agers who try to tag the kid with "Donnerundblitzen."

Actually, I've nothing against the name Don, or Bob or Jack or Bill, for that matter. I do pine for a Mergatroyd once in a while, or a Eustace or Isambard, just to break the monotony. For monotony it surely is when no more than a dozen or so Christian names attach themselves to 79 percent of the population in this pothole on the Milky Way.

It's all this informality, that's what it is. Not like the old days, when surnames had a role in the cosmic scheme of things, to denote our peghole in the cribbage board of life - like Campbell (the man who runs the soup kitchen), Banker (the wretched sod who turned down my car loan application) and Crooks (the Bankers just down the street).

Gone, too, are the honorifics that in my halcyon days were known as "being polite." Like "mister" and "missus" and "madam" (no, the other kind). The good old tug on the forelock, a shuffle of the feet and a "yassuh, Massa Al" do seem to be things of the past, more's the pity.

When politeness goes, the world can slide off its axis, as a telephone call I received this week vividly demonstrated. "Hello, Al, Don here," the caller said. It was Don, an editor I work with on occasional stints at The Daily Telegraph in London.

And my heart sank. Don is a very nice chap, but I had just put in two late nights at the Telegraph, I was bone-weary, and it was evident that Don was ringing to ask that I fill in on another emergency shift. Sigh ... "Yes, Don," says I.

"Al, is Elizabeth there?" he says. Which took me aback just a bit, because as far as I know, Don has never met my wife. Somewhat flummoxed, I replied, "No, she's at work just now, but she should be back around 6:30."

"Oh, not to worry," he replied. "I just wanted to know if she wants the fuchsias replanted before the frosts." Confusion is now at full gallop. Telegraph Don knows as much about fuchsias as I know about truck farming on the planet Krypton - and anyway, what business is it of his whether my wife's fuchsias need replanting?

Hold on, maybe it's not Telegraph Don. Maybe it's Elizabeth's Uncle Don, who knows all about fuchsias, and who gave us the ones we now have at our country cottage. Except her Uncle Don's name is not Don, but Doug.

Then it clicked. Telephoning Don was not Telegraph Don, nor was he Uncle Don who is Uncle Doug, but Don our occasional gardener at the cottage. I told him what to do with the fuchsias.

All this first-name business, you see, bodes no good - and if you have a first name like mine, the confusion can happily transcend into another dimension. As I learned early in my days as a foreign correspondent based in the Middle East, on a particular assignment that took me to Damascus, Syria.

I was sitting at the bar in the Meridien Hotel when I heard an announcement that caught my attention because it was all in Arabic - except for my name, smack in the middle of it. Now my knowledge of Arabic consists of exactly two phrases - ana sahafi ("I am a journalist") and nos kilo mos ("a pound of bananas"). But I do recognize my own name.

The announcement was repeated twice more, each time in more strident tones. I was panic-stricken. All sorts of possibilities swirled about in the mush that had passed for my brain: "Attention Mr. Al Webb, the information minister is here to see you," or "Mr. Al Webb, there is trouble with your passport," or "Mr. Al Webb, please come to the front desk to be escorted to a place of execution for what you wrote about President al-Assad."

And there you have it, the nub of the problem. In the Arab world, "al-" with a hyphen is a common prefix to a surname. The hotel clerk saw the "Al" on the message and assumed it was for an Arab resident named "Al-Webb." Although where he ever got the idea that "Webb" might be an Arab surname, I'll never figure.

The message, incidentally, was that a telephone call I had asked for to Beirut was ringing. By the time I had gotten over visions of being beheaded by scimitar in the Damascus town square or tossed from the top of the nearest minaret, the other end had hung up in disgust.

That's the problem with this name business. Now when I answer the phone at home in London, I'm never quite sure whether it's for me or for a scarfaced hoodlum in Chicago or the vice president of the United States.

But I sure do know how to order bananas in Arabic.

Thought for the Week: Some days you're the dog, some days you're the hydrant.

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