5 years ago I woke up with idea of changing my name. Today, as my daughter is about to be born, I am taking real steps to make the change real.

My daughter will look like my father-in-law. It is inevitable. All children in her side of the family look like him. To have my baby girl not only look like an aging Chinese restaurateur but also bear his last name will make our lives a bit more complicated.

First of all, I don't want the authorities to think that I have kidnapped her. When I travel I let my hair down. I wear a tracksuit and an unfriendly eastern-european frown. Now, if the baby inherits my sense of humour - she will tell people she does not know me. We get stopped. We have different last names. I go to jail and she grows up without a father.

Secondly, having kids is a great motivator to do things that you wanted to do anyway but never had any real motivation to do. My wife's father has stopped smoking. My father left my mom. I'm changing my name. Thanks kid.

Aleksejs -> Alexei

Ever since I was ripped from the womb of Eastern Europe and dropped in London I have introduced myself as 'Alex'. It is short, snappy and ends with an 'x' .It creates regional ambiguity and awkward situations when people assume that my name is 'Alexander' and I have to correct them. "It's actually Alexei, but you should just call me Alex". I look humble and a bit smug.

Yet my passport says "Aleksejs" - a strange and difficult to read version of my name.

In 1991 the country I was born in, USSR, ceased to exist. I stopped being Soviet and became Latvian. Now, the Latvian alphabet has no letter 'x'. The only people allowed to use it are the taxi drivers who have it on their number-plates (eg TX-000). Masculine nouns and names in Latvian mostly end with '-s'.

Thus, being a masculine non-taxi driver boy, I have become Aleksejs. 30 years later I would like to reclaim my birth name. It will use 25% fewer letters, make the name easier to read and, hopefully, bring back my childhood bliss that I still had when my official name was Alexei.

Belovs -> Balts

On the scale of name changes this one is a meek one. Like getting a butterfly tattoo on your calf - a very safe and conservative rebellion.

Belovs is just Belov + the Latvian male suffix '-s'. 'Belov' originates from 'white' in Russian. 'Balts' is 'white' in Latvian. This is the whole origin story. The 'what' of it.

In the simpler times when I did not have access to my personal media platform I would have stopped the explanation right there. Through sour media, I will explain myself so that my potential descendants realise the full weight of the fickle motivation that drove their ancestor.

Egocentric selfishness

June 13 2009. 12:01. Facebook is launching "usernames" - a chance to grab a unique id and use it as part of your page URL. I am there on the minute and manage to grab '/belov' because '/alex' and '/cutie-pie' are already not available. Still, I am very satisfied.

'Belov' is one of the most common Russian last name and having it as a unique id is super lucky. In the following months another Belov wanted to buy the username. There were multiple /belov hijacking attempts by Belov hackers. A particularly angry Belov has threatened me to surrender the name to him.

In the digital age of unique ids it sucks to have a very common name. Often you get reduced to a number ('alex-belov-42') or a decorator ('the-alex-belov'). My birth given identifier does not hold up and I have pretend to be satisfied with creative solutions when registering for widely used online services.

'Balts' is both rare and short which makes it great for 'official business' usernames.

I don't associate with it

The last name and bad eye-sight are the only things I have inherited from my father. He had me very young, left the family and later died in an easily-avoidable accident.

I hold no grudge but also I hold no connection to him or to his ancestors. I was raised by my grandparents who had a different surname. My mother has remarried and hers has changed too.

In a way, according to my last name, I was always just a "family of one". There was never a "Belov family", just Alex Belov doing his best. Being the sole proprietor makes it easy to just shed this name and move into something more comfortable.

It is fun

This should have been the "reason number one" but I have tucked it away for last because there is a certain prejudice against "doing seemingly unfun things for fun". Changing your name is one of the more rock'n'roll activities available to an average peasant like me.

There is something deeply magical in replacing a combination of sounds that was used to identify you since birth with a different combination of sounds. This is the most bureaucratic way of rebelling against the gifts I was given at birth. And, boy oh boy, it is super bureaucratic.

Changing your name as a British citizen is a simple process. Changing your name as both Latvian and British citizen is a perilous journey of rules and exceptions and forms and frustration and conflicting information and contacting the embassy and questioning your motivations and writing a post about why I am putting myself through this.

This is a performative act that concludes (statistically) the first half-time of my life and establishes me to (theoretically) enjoy the second half-time with a bit more gusto.