Alder's Tone

We’ve done everything to try and get inspiration. Even watching the World Cup we’ve gone through players names. Even Zinedine wasn’t 100% ruled out, well not until “that” head-butt.

We bought a name book from Borders. Biggest waste of money ever. We thought it was just that book, so we’ve been sneaking looks at others, and to be honest they’re all, well, shite. Totally cool if you are looking for some ancient Hebrew name that hasn’t been used for half a millennia, otherwise they are just going to become recycled paper.

The subject has been visited three times now, if memory serves me right. Although two of them are so close I may call it one elongated discussion.

The first was the whole “do we need to do this” denial thing. So we drew up separate shortlists and compared them. Not a massive disaster, there was some overlap, but for names we had low on our lists. So the denial returned and it was put on the back-burner.

There’s really one thing that any name has to stand up to and that’s the playground test. Thankfully I have a very good friend who still mentally live in a playground, so there’s a good tester there. One we hadn’t thought of was the accent test. We had a girl’s name just about sorted, but we were advised against due to the local accent dropping a crucial “t”. I would consider moving…

So now I’m wondering what other tests there are. Sure, there’s the surname test – will a first name flow with a surname? But that’s a given, isn’t it? All we seem to do is eliminate names, often for odd reasons – “I didn’t like a xxx at school”. AAARRRGGGHHHHHHH!

I don’t know why we’re agonising so much over this. When Junior is born s/he may not look like an x but more of a y. And then they’ll grow out of it anyway, and I’ll remember the wrong decision when I go and register (on my head be it…)

For now Ripley will have to do.