Bernard Michael Rochford Discovers Himself Through Anagrams

You learn a lot about yourself in retirement. Some of it’s expected—how to slow down, how to garden without killing everything, how to drink tea without checking the time. But every so often, something unexpected creeps into your quiet little routine and turns your afternoon into a philosophical rabbit hole.

For me, that something was anagrams.

It started innocently enough. One lazy Thursday, I Googled “fun anagram generator” after hearing someone on the radio mention that "Clint Eastwood" unscrambles to "Old West Action." Brilliant. Clever. Harmless. So, naturally, I typed in my full name:

Bernard Michael Rochford.

Thirty seconds later, I was 14 anagrams deep, reevaluating my entire existence.

The first result?
"Chronic Old Farmer Behead."

Now, I’m no farmer, but I have chronic opinions. And I have been known to “behead” a few overgrown hedges in my time. It gave me a chuckle. But then I found:

"Admirable Chef or Corn Herd."

Which, frankly, felt disturbingly accurate. I do love to cook. And I once accidentally herded a group of children away from a sausage sizzle that was out of bread rolls. Chef? Check. Corn? Possibly. Herding? Apparently yes.

There’s something delightfully silly about anagrams. You take your proud, serious-sounding name—Bernard Michael Rochford, which sounds like it should belong to someone who wears a velvet smoking jacket—and you rearrange it into chaos. Into poetry. Into nonsense that somehow makes too much sense.

Here are some of my favourites:

• Arch Bold French Doer Aim — makes me sound like a charismatic Parisian architect with a past.
  

• Beach Crone Harm Lord If — I don’t even know what that means, but it’s a brilliant sentence fragment.
  

• Choral Bench Dried Farm O — which sounds like a terrible jazz album I might secretly enjoy.

The more I dug, the more I realised this wasn’t just a game. It was a mirror—one that distorted, stretched, and played with the idea of identity in the best way. For years, I was Bernard the Osteopath, a man with a business card and a waitlist. Now I’m Harold from Bench Radio or Mr. Beach Land Heroic Ford and somehow that feels just as true.

There’s freedom in seeing your name—this thing you’ve carried all your life—tossed around like Scrabble tiles. You realise your identity is a lot more flexible than you think.

My wife got curious and typed in her name too. Hers produced “Calmer Than You, Derek,” which is remarkable considering we don’t even know a Derek. Still, she’s been using it to sign texts ever since.

At one point I started saving the anagrams, writing them in a notebook. Some of them felt like titles to books I might one day write. Others were names of characters I’d love to meet—or be. There was one I especially liked:

“Cabin Hero: Cold Farm Drench.”

It sounds like a rural mystery novel starring a retired osteopath who solves crimes using only common sense and leftover lamb shoulder.

There’s something fun about surrendering to nonsense. We spend so much of our lives trying to be tidy, consistent, adult. Then a free website jumbles your name and reminds you that even something as permanent as your own identity is just a set of letters pretending to stay still.

And yes, not every anagram is flattering.
"Acne Horrid Famed Belch" is not making it onto any gravestone.
But somehow, even the unflattering ones feel like part of the whole. Like facets of a character I’m still discovering.

In a way, playing with anagrams felt like a smaller version of what retirement has become for me: a reshuffling of the familiar. A way of rearranging what you thought you knew—about your name, your time, your routines—and finding something unexpected in the gaps.

So now, when I’m bored or in between pulling weeds and overwatering pot plants, I open the notebook and see what Bernard Michael Rochford has transformed into today. Sometimes I try to write a short story based on one of the names. Sometimes I just sit and laugh at how absurd it all is.

The world, it turns out, is full of meaning. Even in meaningless jumbles.

And if you ever see a man in Brisbane muttering, “Flambé Orchid Ranch Hero” under his breath while buying onions, don’t be alarmed. That’s just me, Bernard Michael Rochford, having a little identity crisis at the fruit market.

And loving every minute of it.