Modern naming trends give me a headache. Back when I was a girl, there were about ten girl names that people cycled through, and it made things so much more simple. If you forgot someone’s name, you just picked whatever went with your hunch. It was almost always Margaret for a decade or so, or Mabel, or Agnes in the couple of years when that was popular. Nowadays people just mash names together willy-nilly. Jessabelle, Tanya-Marie, Kiralee…and those are just the mash-ups. It gets much worse! ‘Tamika’, really…

Personally, I blame the reality TV. Digital antennas hit Melbourne like a storm in the 90s, and now we’re all watching dross from America, where they just make up their baby names on the spot. Oh, my vendetta isn’t with the digital antennas. We even got one installed a few years ago and it lets me watch all my favourite British soaps almost ath the same time as back in the homeland. I couldn’t live without my West-Dwellers, Carnation Close, Emmydale or my ultimate favourite, Royal of the Dale, set up in the highlands of Scotland and featuring people have real arguments over real issues. Oh, some of those are dross, I know full-well…but at least the people have sensible names. You can follow the plots because they have sensible names like Peggy, Andrew, Darlene and Cheryl. Ooh, Cheryl…she’s heading to jail for staging a fireworks display in that nursing home to try to scare her grandfather into giving her his Welsh oil company, and also to get revenge for when he planted drugs in her horse saddlebag when they were riding across America for charity, because she’d admitted to mixing up grandma’s medication and causing her to develop a deadly case of spleen measles.  

So no, my quarrel is not with digital antenna installation. Melbourne needs such things! What we don’t need is a slew of silly, made-up names. What’s wrong with a simple Mabel? Or Rupert?

-Margaret