Names ... who'd 'ave 'em?

Well it's been quite an uneventful week all told, taken up mostly by work. Becky remarked only this morning how it'd already been a week since we saw the midwife.

I had a first-time, small-scale emergency exercise for a group of individuals on Monday, which went very well , although the sheer amount of work required to put one of these things together is not reflected in the two hours it takes to do the things! More's the pity. It's like spending all day preparing a Christmas dinner then having everyone devour it in 30 minutes flat. Fat gits.

So I was down in Guildford on Sunday to avoid any complications trying to travel on Monday morning, which didn't go down at all well with Becky ... maybe more than 48 hours' warning would be better! Although I have to say, a leisurely (or as Americans would say "leezhurlee") drive down the M40 on a Sunday afternoon isn't all that bad ... certainly beats the early morning traffic I usually have to contend with.

We were looking at a names book for the baby this weekend. Some of the names people give their offspring these days, it's verging on the immoral. Get these ...

• Girls
• Semirami (meaning "half a savoury pork sausuage snack")
  
• Sharlott (meaning "related to onions")
  
• Sinead (kitsch, shortened form of "skinhead")
• Vidula (some medical term, probably vulgar)
• Xylophila (hates foreigners whilst at the same time appreciating the sonorofic qualities of the xylophone)

• Boys
• Conan (after the Barbarian / Cimmerian)
• St John (pron. "sin-jun", a name exclusively reserved for children of middle-class tw*t parentage ... same goes for Hugo, Rupert and Angus)
• Sachaverell (compound version of Sacha Distel)
• Saladin (diminutive term for"salad", a name favoured by left-wing vegetarian tree huggers)
• Thierry (after the Arsenal striker & French international)
  
• Henry (after the Arsenal striker & French international)

Worse than those names, my cousin on the Isle of Man mentioned last week that her daughter went to school with a girl called Destiny who had a sister called Harmony ... I still think the winner was the Shaniqua, the name I heard in London that day, which our book kindly describes as:

a blend of Shan and Monique or Monica, popular among Afro-Americans. Other forms: Shanika.

I feel like watching tattooed, toothless low-life batter each other on the Jeremy Kyle show now. Fare thee well.