There’s a lot in a name

It’d be a sad day if Eskimo Pies were ever withdrawn from the market. They’re one of my indulgences, the perfect dessert, vanilla ice cream covered in a crackly layer of chocolate. Elegant simplicity. OK, the chocolate shatters and little bits melt into your pullover if you eat them in front of the TV, but who cares? I’ve been eating them for the last 100 years with consistent, childish pleasure, and never imagined the Inuit people, who we used to call Eskimos, would take offence.

Inuit Pies wouldn’t sound the same, even if they let us call them that. There’s a lot in a name, and I hate to think what they’re currently considering. It could easily put me off.

The nougat-ish Penny Eskimo, too, was one of the joys of my tooth-rotting childhood. I don’t even look at them now, under their new name. They’ve lost their sugary magic.

It’ll be goodbye next to the Afghan biscuit. Its demise has been predicted for years, though I never, in all my 100 years of eating and making them, imagined they were connected with real people in a real place called Afghanistan. I had a vague idea that there was an explanation, making no sense, that they were named after a kind of crochet rug made with wool. Associate them with the dismal, endless wars there and they’re not so appetising.

Someone has suggested naming Afghans ‘‘Decolonisation Walnut Surprise’’. Couldn’t be worse.

Does this mean Chinese Chews are under threat, and does Chow Chow, the nasty yellow pickle stained with turmeric that people used to put in luncheon sausage sandwiches, have a racist overtone? What about Aunt Daisy’s Ngauruhoe Snow, a kind of Baked Alaska? Is that colonisation in outrageous practice? She also has Spiders and Stuffed Monkeys, which sound kind of disgusting, and – this is true, but surely not for long – Ma¯ ori Kisses.

We can’t be too careful. Offence lingers in the most unlikely places when even Aunt Daisy, dead as she may be, should hang her head in shame.

I have an uneasy feeling that my mother made Ma¯ ori Kisses long ago in a terrible little electric oven that always seemed to burn things. They were so-so, as opposed to the perfection of bought stuff.

Any chance we could lighten up and stop dragging our chins along the floor, regretting our regrettable ancestors and their unforgivable baking? Mea culpas are exhausting. Finger wagging must be worse, though it has a tradition leading back to ancient times and the invention of terylene.

White terylene curtains – ‘‘We can see out, but they can’t see in,’’ as my mother so elegantly put it – ruled, and in many streets in this country they still do. You feel the eyes watching you as you walk down those streets, watching you for what? A discarded Eskimo Pie wrapper?

Some people would be better off just baking. I guess young people want a better, greener world than the one we’ve made so far, and the unconscious racism of the past being spotted is part of that. But who are the young people who fly here for budget campervan holidays, relieving themselves in public places, especially noted beauty spots?

Would they include the social media users trampling over private property to enjoy an infinity pool above Anawhata Beach, photograph the view, and describe it online as ‘‘one of the nicer places I have urinated’’? They’d be the entitled brats who shag, get drunk, and strew such idyllic settings with their rubbish, I guess.

If that’s what the future looks like we’ve definitely had it.