Pete looked out across the room from behind the counter.  Pete’s Diner was busy today, it had been worth the risk he’d taken starting up it three years ago.  Business was good, but he did need to think of a way to make it more upmarket, to make it a bit more outstanding, so to speak.  It was trickling along nicely but not really going anywhere.  He had his regulars, like the dark-haired girl at the table by the window.  She came in quite often.  Usually for food but sometimes just for coffee, and there were a few others here tonight as well.

There was always time to catch up on paperwork while the burgers and sausages sizzled on the grill behind him.  He counted on his fingers.  January, February, March, April, May…  the fifth month.  Geez, it was always hard for him.  He could never just relate a month name to a month number without counting them through.  It was because the left side of the brain dealt with numbers and the right side dealt with language, and two halves of his brain just weren’t connected together in the right way.  It would be a hell of a lot better if the month names made sense anyway.  September, October, November, December…  ‘sept’, ‘oct’, ‘nov’ and ‘dec’ being standard prefixes for seven, eight, nine and ten, but they weren’t, they were nine, ten, eleven and twelve.

That was what happened when you had a Roman calendar.  The old Gregorian one with its ten months wasn’t right, but you could have fixed it by alternating 36 and 37 days, which would have added up to 365.  That would have been wrong every four years and would have meant adding an extra day, but the modern Roman one was still wrong every four years and meant adding an extra day.  After too much vino someone probably shouted “Let’s fix this stupid calendar by adding two new months in honour of the great Julius Augustus Caesar”, which was accompanied no doubt by a drunken cheer and the throwing of more Christians to the lions, or whatever it was they did.  But the two new months couldn’t be numbers eleven and twelve, could they?  Oh no, the Great Emperor’s months must be in the summer when it’s nice and warm, so we’ll stick ‘em after May.  That means we need to make the months alternately 30 and 31 days, but we can’t have one of the Great Emperor’s months being a short one – July and August will both have to be 31 days – which doesn’t add up, so we’ll nick a couple of days off another month.  So, the months in our glorious new calendar will mostly alternate between 30 and 31 days, except for February, which we’ll muck about with so that July and August can both be 31 days.  Oh wait…  but now September to December aren’t the seventh to tenth months, so we really ought to rename them…  and it’s not any better than the old calendar because it’s still a day wrong every four years.  Bugger it, nobody will notice! All hail Caesar!

Yep, that was the way to become famous.  Go on a rampage invading every country you can find, kill hundreds of thousands of people, bring down the Egyptian Empire, and get two new months named after you.  But he still never had an affix or a suffix, did he?  Not like Peter The Great. 

If you killed one or two people, you were a criminal.  If you went out and destroyed complete civilisations, you were a hero.  Still, even Peter had to start out small and he couldn’t always have been called Peter The Great.  After he’d managed to pinch Kiev off the Polish, they probably called him Peter The Pretty Good for a while.  Everybody had to start somewhere.  It was almost certainly his efforts to destroy the Ottoman Empire that earned him the accolade of being ‘The Great’.

‘Caesar the Geezer’ had a nice sound to it.  Nah! Too common.

Then the thought struck him.  Maybe that was what he needed! Not destroying the Ottoman Empire, but thinking big! Wearing a bigger hat!

Yes…  it would work.  Get a new image.  Put the diner on the map, so to speak.  But he couldn’t be Peter The Great, could he?  No, that wouldn’t work.  Not around here, he would have to think about something else, and maybe going just a bit bigger wasn’t a good idea.  If you were going to re-brand, it was probably best to just pick something truly impressive and go for it.  It would be the start of a whole new world for him and his business.  The makings of a business Empire, something scalable he could develop and franchise.  It just needed a proper catchy name to take it to market, something that would inspire but not sound too grandiose.

The girl with the long curly hair who was sitting by the window got up and walked to the door.  If he was a young, slim, Italian owner instead of a sweaty, bald, burger-flipper he could get away with having a magnificent head of long black curls too.  He wasn’t, but you could always dream.

Anyway, the sausages for table five were done, so he needed to get them plated up.  But what to rebrand as?  Perhaps something that still involved his name, something which branded the diner as very much an extension of his persona.  Peter the…  something?  Less formal.  Pete the something?

Maybe he would sleep on it and decide what to do tomorrow.  Usually when he did that some event of the day made an impression on him.

Perhaps, he thought, an idea would come to him in his dreams.

It would have to be something catchy…

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