PresentTense: A truce has been declared, the hatchet buried, our beef has been cooked. The civil war of the David O'Dohertys (or O'Doherties as I prefer to pluralise us) is over.
It began one night last year when, during a particularly vigorous bout of procrastination when I should have been making up jokes, I committed the very contemporary sin of putting my name into the Google internet search engine. I found that I, David O'Doherty the stand-up comedian, was in third spot on the list of David O'Doherties.
At No 2 was a David O'Doherty I'd heard of before, David O'Doherty the renowned violinist. In fact, early in my career I had considered stealing some quotes from one of his glowing reviews to put on my poster. "A commanding performance . . . David O'Doherty leaves the audience gasping for an encore," I'd almost nicked, neatly skirting around the bit about the Bach sonata. But I didn't. It's not the David O'Doherty way.
At the top of the list was a David O'Doherty I was not familiar with: David O'Doherty the mathematician. What immediately grabbed my attention was his reference to David O'Doherty the renowned violinist and myself on his home page. He had no problems, he said, with "Violins", but I was double trouble.
First, he sometimes had to field e-mails from people who had been to my shows and had mistakenly contacted him, depriving him of valuable time when no doubt he could have been working on his formulae or trying to write upside-down words on his calculator. Second, he lamented how I had recently bought and registered the domain name davidodoherty.com, the prime real estate for all David O'Doherties on the internet. This frustration can be judged by his description of my purchase as "infinitely annoying", surely the strongest terms a mathematician can use.
The incident was notable enough for me to mention it on stage at my gig the following night. The fascinating part was speculating on how exactly those people had ended up e-mailing him. They didn't seem to have paid any attention to the website's numerous mathematical references, his experimental work on prime numbers for example, or the large picture of him on it.
In thinking the thing was done and dusted that night I grossly underestimated the curiosity/mischievousness of the human spirit. A large proportion of that audience it seems went home and checked out the David O'Doherties for themselves, many of them deciding to leave messages complimenting David O'Doherty the mathematician on the comedy show they had just seen him do.
I received a phone call the following evening from David O'Doherty the mathematician. He had found my number in the phone book and by a process of elimination (possibly by calling David O'Doherty the violinist first) had tracked me down. Yes, I admitted, it was my fault. I had mentioned him at my gig and I was responsible for his sudden glut of nuisance e-mail. An eminently reasonable man, he accepted my apology and we moved on to other less David O'Doherty-centric conversation.
I thought the matter finished and went back to the business of trying to make up jokes, not realising that David O'Doherty the mathematician was plotting possibly the single most brilliant piece of retaliation in the entire history of warfare.
In tracking down my phone number in the phone book he also had my address. And so he began responding to those pranksters who had sent him e-mails that in fact, yes, he was David O'Doherty the comedian, and would be delighted to meet or talk to them in person, providing my home address and phone number so that they could arrange it.
I could only tip my hat to my wily namesake. Oh, he got me. He got me good.
I would recount the tale occasionally on stage and the audience would applaud in breathless admiration for David O'Doherty the mathematician, the true king of the David O'Doherties. I simply did not have sufficient brainpower to think of a way to get back at him.
Instead, I proposed putting him as the front man of a David O'Doherty-based cabaret trio. Violins could do his violins thing, I could talk and play my keyboard and David O'Doherty the mathematician could stride on at the end, dressed as the prime number of his choosing and the audience would give him the standing ovation.
But suddenly that is all a faded memory. The time for inter-David O'Doherty bickering has passed. The war is over, not through enlightened application of logic or anything sensible like that. No. There is a much more potent reason. Now we have a common enemy. This week I read of a British schoolboy golfer who is attracting plaudits from, among others, Nick Faldo, who expects him to dominate the game in the not-so-distant future, taking numerous titles and inevitably with that, the top spot on the Google search engine.
This young upstart's name happens to be David O'Doherty.
David O'Doherty's comedy album, Giggle Me Timbers, will be available soon
Shane Hegarty is on leave