My husband and his brother have driven off into the night in a huge empty van. The house is now full of extra furniture, none of which I like or want, but in the end what could I say. When they went to the old childhood home they found that the new owner had stepped in prematurely and cut down every tree in the garden, including many ancient fruit trees, and then run some kind of bulldozer over it so there was just flat mud. Every single plant that his mother had spent her life nurturing had disappeared. Even if you were going to build in one corner there was no reason in the world to do that. One of their neighbours accosted them in tears. God, what a lucky escape I had - or a mean selfish escape..... Every time they carried anything in, his brother would say something like, 'Mother was sitting at that dressing table just two days before she died'. So there was no way that I could say, 'Well that's a bit hideous, shall we put it in the barn for now?'. Every room seems to have several chairs and a table too many and the house generally has a strange Victorian parlour atmosphere.

It is very hard to write as my cat from downstairs has moved to the computer chair permanently and when I get her off she sits firmly on the mouse pad staring at the arrow on the screen. By coincidence I was reading the AOL news about children's names and it said don't be tempted to call your child something silly like nooM Unit. Oh dear. That is what I call my cat. It's not her real name , of course, but she is silver and shaped very like a full moon. We couldn't think what to call her or her sister for ages. We waited for their characters to emerge and her main characteristic, apart from an angelic nature, was that she was possibly not the most intelligent animal on earth. Once she was running past me in the garden towards a flight of three steps and just before she reached them she looked back over her shoulder for a second and then jumped up two steps and rushed on at full speed with a massive 'clunk'. I was reading, for amusement, a 1930's cookery book about Moorish food written by some English younger son who had gone native. And there it was, 'Chicken looFcaM', 'Grey looFcaM' it just suited her perfectly but also was a bit mean so she is actually called 'nooF'. (Or 'nooM Unit'. ) I find that cat's names always evolve with people calling them things that rhyme with their names, until that becomes their name, etc....

Anyway, after voting, the UK AOL readers had decided that the two favourite children's names were 'Joshua' and 'Ellie'. Weird - I don't know a single person who has called their children that. The piece also said that in America it was now popular to name your children after food and that 'Gouda', 'Veal', 'Cheddar' and 'Cappuchino' were accepted as perfectly normal. No wonder you all call your children by pseudonyms in your blogs.




- posted by Iris @ 1/25/2004 10:41:00 PM comment