please tell me your second name

I went back to Catney yesterday. I was making myself tea when my dad asked me "So who were those two women then?" I stared at him until I knew he was actually talking to me. Here's the mystery I posed Facebook by way of "explanation":

Apparently two young American (possibly, my parents weren't sure) women wearing "badges" turned up at my folks' house last week, asking for me by the name of Mattie. Now, from the vague description I got, they're nobody I know, and not everyone knows me by that name, and I wouldn't give out my parents' address. So - who the hell were they?

For what it's worth, I don't feel like there's anything "unpleasant" there, but it perplexes and weirds me out. There was a voicemail Thursday from a number I didn't know: just two seconds of garbled sound.

Facebook thinks it's Mormons, though I've done my level best to avoid them. (Two of them - on bicycles - once tried to hail me when I was crossing a road. I don't know if it was their national Kill An Atheist Day or something.) How the fuck they got my name I don't know. But I think it's one of those unsolved things that won't affect me beyond a brief sense of unsettlement.

RIP Brian Aldiss, whose novels and short stories I was very fond of in my days of reading SF. By way of remembrance I dipped into his "best fantasy stories" collection A Romance of The Equator. I found a second-hand copy of K. J. Bishop's Decadent/New Weird novel The Etched City. (A pity she never followed it up.) I was mostly reading Mark Cocker's excellent Crow Country though it focuses mostly on rooks; I have memories of a small rookery beyond the canal. It's interesting how viewpoints can differ: he describes the calls of jackdaws as sounding like the note of flint on flint; to me they've always sounded like chuckles, a metallic but not harsh sound. Like silver. perhaps. Though I didn't see it, there was a fox calling out in the field some time after 1 am, a half-swallowed cough.

The ivy has come into flower now; in a few weeks the leek-green globes will draw in wasps. Hopefully it will bring out the Holly Blue butterfly as well, which would be welcome - there's been precious little unclouded sky lately and I'd like to see that colour somewhere.