Antiva

Think of T-shirt sales, it’s probably a safe bet to say that there have been more sold adorned with the mugshot of Mr Guevara than there ever would be with one of, say, Mary Berry. Rebels were people like Gandhi, James Dean and Robin Hood; they were the poets, the artists, the pirates and the highwaymen. Even the Rebel Alliance was a bunch of rebels. We are Sappho, Sylvia Plath and Mary Shelley.

The thing is we have a problem, and it’s an almost insurmountable one.

Were you in a band when you were younger? Did you start one from scratch with your mates? If you can answer ‘yes’, then you know what the issue at hand is. The first thing a freshly formed band does is to convene a meeting at a nearby pub. The assorted members troop in, nurse a single pint for three hours and argue the merits of the names they scrawled on the back of a receipt from Tesco.

World of Leather? No.

Accident and Emergency? No.

Three Letter Acronyms? No.

Bag of Sh you get the idea. Round and round they go, because they appreciate how stupendously vital the epithet is. Trivial stuff such as writing songs, rehearsing and performing live gigs can wait – that sort of flotsam is almost irrelevant to the modern musician anyway.

Naming a band is more difficult than naming a baby. This is a fact for almost all baby namings because of the absence of a drummer, drummers have the knack of messing everything up – hence the reason they tend not to be responsible for having a child. Drummers will never agree to any band name.

How can we all band together, we free-spirited cloud creators, if we don’t have a snappy collective name? Rebels need to be in opposition, which needs to be conveyed in the sobriquet. We need to be Anti-something.

This means that we are Anti the anti-vapers.

This means we are the Antiantivapers.

Or, Antiantiva.

Antiantiva, the sexy, rebellious militant wing of vaping. Well, militant to a point, don’t let that bit scare you. We aren’t setting out to smash the state, system or even the settings on the television. Antiantiva plans to be militant about the sort of cakes we have at meetings, and we might have a very heated discussion about what type of tea to buy from Morrisons.

First order of business: any person with basic knowledge of science knows that two negatives make a positive, so the antis cancel each other out. Removing the anti and the other anti from Antiantiva means that we are just Va.

Damn, which means we are simply vapers. Like every band naming session I’ve ever been a part of, this was all a big waste of time – except that this is proof we are all cool.