Psychology says the people who never forget a face but always lose the name aren’t bad with names at all — a face connects to everything the brain knows about a person, while the name is the one detail attached to nothing, a sound with no meaning to hold onto

Bad with names, I would say, in the same tone people use for bad at maths, as though it were a settled fact about my character. Then you meet another man and someone mentions that his surname is Baker. Names stayed much harder to recall than occupations, even when the word itself was identical. That match opens up everything you know about the person, their job, where you met, the koi, the knee. It will feel like a party trick for about a fortnight and then it will feel like just knowing people’s names.