WHAT’S IN A NAME?
Iphoned my mother to tell her about the arrival of her new great- grandson, my first grandchild, 7lbs 2oz of beautiful baby boy, born at great speed, an hour after my daughter arrived at the hospital.
My mother is delighted but also confused, June is 93 and in a nursing home with dementia, which, as many of you will know, is an incredibly distressing disease for everyone involved.
She has been reminded for months that a baby is coming, but she has also been very muddled as to who is having the baby.
A few weeks ago, when I called to say I was coming up to visit her, she warned me against ‘travelling in my delicate condition’, I’m 62, I reminded her, my baby days are over (thank goodness).
A couple of days after he was born, I phoned again to announce his name, ‘He’s called Arlo Jude’, I bellowed into the phone, because like most nonagenarians, she is also quite deaf.
‘Arnold?’, she queried, ‘He’s called Arnold?’
‘Arlo’, I repeated about 20 times, deciding to forget about the Jude bit for a while.
‘Hmmm?’ she muttered.
Funny how names go in and out of fashion, Arnold just doesn’t make it onto the fashionable baby-name lists right now, whilst other similarly old-fashioned names are back on trend.
When my 33-year-old daughter was growing up in the Nineties, there were no Arlos around, but whilst telling anyone who might be remotely interested that, ‘I’ve got an Arlo’, I’ve been slightly taken aback when other people have replied ‘Oh, so have I’!
I have a friend whose daughter very sweetly named one of her boy twins after his maternal great-grandfather, (my mate’s dad) which is cool, considering Stanley is back on the groovy list, like Sidney and Fred. But some names are destined never to be fashionable again, like Derek, which was my dad’s name, I loved my father dearly but I’d never wish his name on a baby.
Back in 1960, had I been a boy, I’d have been Simon, but being a girl, I was named ‘Jenny’ after my mother’s mother. This may have been because I was born in Kuala Lumpur and it was a consolation prize for the fact that she wouldn’t see me for months. So, what will Arlo call me?
Well, I’m his nana, and I can’t tell you how thrilled that makes me.
‘Some names are destined never to be fashionable again, like Derek’