New recruit, Mike Barfield, makes his Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Truths debut on the thorny subject of choosing a name for your child...
Strange isn't it. Multi-million pound companies employ teams of professionals in order to name something as insignificant as a chocolate bar, but when it come to naming another human being it's left to rank amateurs. People like you and me.
Being a parent myself, I sympathise with Bad Namers - well, to an extent. My wife and I had endless begruding arguments in naming both our children. And I can just imagine Angie and David Bowie agreeing to compromise on the name Zowie, simply because one wanted Eric and the other Neville and neither was prepared to give in.
Our eldest, now a 28 month old boy, will never know how close he came to being called Percy, Louis, Arthur or Monty. My wife was dead set against Monty from the start; Arthur dropped out of the running when a fairly close relative used it; Louis suffered a similar fate; which brings us to 'Percy'. A close family member, or c.f.m. for short, said 'Ugh. Percy? Isn't that an awful name?' And our list of suitable boys names was again depleted.
We named our son in the hospital, deciding he looked like a Jacob. Jacob Barfield. It has a ring to it. And we love him.
Two years on, we now have another addition to our family - a little girl - Alice Bluebell. We thinks it's a beautiful name - admittedly the Bluebell part is a teensy bit unusual. When we tell some people what we've called her, we may as well be issuing gilt-edged invitations to insult us to our faces. They say things like, "What?, you've named her after a railway line?", or "Well, at least it's a middle name," or "She won't thank you for that when she's older."
Ah well. I'm sure what my wife and I have been through is as nothing compared to the late Frank Zappa with his son Dweezil and his daughter MoonUnit...
