Once Upon A Time in the West . . . Country (30 page)

(1) We were only weeks away from an event that would put it all into perspective.

(2) We could appeal against the decision. This was what our architect advised, on the grounds that their objections were without foundation and they had failed to follow their own planning guidelines.

As it turned out, we had support amongst our community.

Every member of the local parish council wrote letters to the National Park in support of us, and many people in the village stopped to encourage us and tell tales of woe regarding their own failed planning applications. We may have been refused, but there was no point in getting angry or fed up about it. Life, like President Putin, is too short.

Unappealing a prospect though it was, we would appeal.

***

The rain continued to beat down throughout a brutally wet winter. Sod, the malevolent and spiteful God whom I first described in Chapter 3, had decided to make us suffer in return for the blissful hours of sunshine He had provided over the summer. High winds and driving rain did the job exceptionally. Inundation was what He chose for many. We were lucky enough to live at the top of a hill and our only discomfort, beyond many an unpleasant dash to the car, was the sound of brooks and streams running high as they gushed down to swell the rivers in the valley below. Surprisingly, the kale that we had attempted to grow in the summer and which had been decimated by the caterpillars, started to make a comeback. So there you have it – endless winter rain is better for kale than it is for those living on flood plains in Somerset.

As I re-emerged into village life, post-Titch, there was some excitement amongst the villagers who had followed my progress in the local media. ‘Where’s Titch?’ was the most common question, just as ‘Where’s your fridge?’ had been the most prevalent after I’d completed
Round Ireland With a Fridge
. It seems that people, deep philosophical beings that we are, need to know the whereabouts of things.

‘I READ ABOUT YOU IN THE PAPER!’ called Reg, at his customary volume that was, let us say, enthusiastic.

Reg lived with village hall committee member Ann, but they were not a
couple
. As far as I understood it, 86-year-old Reg had formerly worked for Ann and her husband. When the husband had become terminally ill, he’d asked Reg to look after Ann once he had passed away, and that was what Reg had done. Ann and Reg lived like incredibly old student flatmates. I’d been popping round to their little farm (nobody seemed to be sure which one of them owned it) to buy eggs for quite a few months now and I’d always enjoyed our little exchanges, which often became extended over a cup of tea and biscuits. I’d grown to like the way Reg bellowed at you, as if you were the other side of the room.

‘YOU GONNA TAKE MY TRACTOR OUT ON A FUNDRAISING TRIP?’ he demanded.

Reg, like Ken, was a great lover of tractors. Men in the countryside seem to develop this trait, just as men in cities grow to like Porsches, or develop irrational loyalties to football clubs. Reg had renovated a 1960s’ Zetor, a Czechoslovakian tractor, and he was inordinately proud of it. Having read about my antics with the pig, he now saw me as a man who would take on any challenge that was laid before him, and he wanted to see his tractor in the headlines after I’d driven it from Lands End to John O’Groats.

‘I’m not sure that I’ll have the time once the baby’s born,’ I pointed out.

Reg shot me a look that came straight out of the
Confirmed Bachelor’s Handbook
. As a man who had never married, nor sired any offspring, I suspect that he couldn’t comprehend why anyone would willingly subject themselves to such a fate. I hoped that in the years to come, I would be able to make a strong case in its favour. For the moment, I just felt like a man on parole awaiting a lengthy trial, the verdict of which was far from certain.

‘WHAT WAS THAT PIG OF YOURS CALLED?’ demanded Reg, changing the subject completely and, pleasingly, failing to make the more common enquiry as to its geographical location.

‘Titch,’ I replied.

‘GOOD NAME!’ he said, in a tone that suggested I needed his approval. ‘GOOD NAME!’

Reg was right. Titch, of course, was an excellent name for the pig that I had just spent so much time with. It was a name that meant something, and most names don’t. Not that Fran and I had any names lined up for our future progeny, and one of the problems with having chosen not to identify the sex of our baby was that we had to refer to the bump as ‘it’.

‘
It’
s due on the twenty-fourth of March.’

‘
It’
s getting bigger.’

‘
It’
s kicking.’

Given what we’d been told in one of the many books we were beginning to plough our way through, calling the baby ‘it’ could be detrimental. According to some American doctor with a lot of letters after his or her (or its) name, the baby can hear our voices long before it is born. Apparently we ought to be talking to, encouraging, and singing lullabies to our baby. So identifying our baby as ‘it’ might mean that ‘it’ would arrive in a grumpy sulk.

‘Oh, you’ve given me a name
now
, have you? Why bother? Why not just carry on with the “it” business that I’ve had to endure for the last nine months? Don’t mind me while I cry for four hours. It’s called revenge.’

Not that we’d have been able to come up with a name, even if we’d known the sex. Naming a child, we were now discovering, was fraught with complications. There are all sorts of factors that we hadn’t considered. For a start, when we parents name our child we make a statement about
us.
Calling a boy John, or a girl Sarah (perfectly nice names), might indicate that we’re unimaginative or boring. Why? Because these are really common names, and there are hundreds of Johns and Sarahs already. However, going too far the other way and naming one’s child after a fruit (Apple) or a country (India), then we might be declaring ourselves to be so unimaginative and boring that we need to give a clear signal to the world that this is exactly what we’re not.

Of course, we don’t have to pick the name from those available from our own cultural name pool. There’s a boy’s name that is quite popular in Spain and South America.

Jesus.

Was that an option if we had a boy, I wondered? Or would that be placing too much expectation on the lad? Seemingly not a problem for the Latinos to name their child after the alleged Son of God,
1
nor for our Muslim brothers to opt for their great spiritual leader, Muhammad.

The British, however, seem to be more literal. If you call your child Jesus, it must be because you either think your child is the Son of God, or that he’s jolly similar. Undoubtedly he will be teased and bullied by his childhood peers, and his inability to turn water into wine will be heavily criticised during his student years. Not only that, the poor lad will never know when people are calling to him or not. Every time someone stubs a toe and exclaims ‘Jesus!’, he will come running over, only to be sworn at and sent packing. Deep emotional scarring. Best not to deliver that to a child simply by the choice of a name. There are so many other ways of achieving the same results, so no need to rush it.

Foreign names are fun, but most are synonymous with a particularly famous film or pop star from that country. Or a mad politician or dictator. (The name Adolf really fell in the popularity stakes in the 1940s and ’50s.) And then again, do we really want to be seen to be naming our child
after
someone?

I certainly wasn’t going to suggest to Fran that we went down the route often taken by Americans (one that they shamelessly stole from our royal families), of giving the child the same name as the father and then slapping a number at the end.

Oscar Hammerstein II

Loudon Wainwright III

Tony Hawks II

This name says more about the father than the mother. Presumably she has played little part in the name-choosing process. She may, at some early stage, have whimpered that she quite liked ‘Daniel’ or ‘Sam’, only to be shouted down by the tyrannical father, desperate to have his name and specialness prolonged on this earth. Another similar trick, and one that the kings and queens of England rejected, is just to whack a ‘junior’ at the end.

Sammy Davis Jr

George Bush Jr
2

It says a lot about the male domination of society that this kind of thing is acceptable. The poor woman has already been asked to surrender her family name, but now she has been trounced again. ‘Look, darling,’ explains the father, ‘never mind that you’ve carried this thing around in your belly for nine months and heroically endured the physical challenges of childbirth, we’re giving it
my
name, OK? Good. Thought you wouldn’t mind.’

Our former Chancellor of the Exchequer Nigel Lawson must have been tempted to run with Nigel Lawson II for his first son, but I imagine he recognised this as an American fad with which he wasn’t comfortable. The perfectly acceptable name of Dominic was picked. However, he rather let himself down when his first daughter was born two years later. The name Nigella was chosen.
Nigella
is a genus of about fourteen species of annual plants in the buttercup family Ranunculaceae, native to southern Europe, north Africa, and south and south-west Asia. It’s not a recognised girls’ name. OK, Daisy, Rose, Lily, Iris and Jasmine are all names derived from flowers – but they are flowers with which we are familiar. Did Nigel really name his daughter Nigella because he loved the flower and thought she was just as pretty? Or did he go for it because it sounded quite like Nigel? Which just happened to be his name. I don’t know. But given that I’ve never liked his politics, or his quite irresponsible climate change scepticism, I’m quite prepared to hazard an ungenerous guess.

Fran and I developed a new game of batting names around over dinner every evening. We came up with very few that were acceptable to both of us. One of the main problems seemed to be that the name, however much we both liked it, nearly always had some unpleasant connotation for one of us. It had been either the name of a rotten teacher, a child who had once bullied us, or someone who had jilted me or made fun of Fran’s dresses. So few names were free of a negative connection to the past. Even if they were the names of people you liked, there could be a problem, too, as the unreasonable thought popped into your head – what if they became too opinionated?

‘Ah, Fran and Tony must think so much of me to name their child after
me
.’

Of course, there was the option of avoiding this pitfall by just making a name up. Names, well they are only sounds, after all. ‘Mark’ is a sound. Why not reverse the sound and call your child ‘Kram’. Mitt Romney’s parents did that with ‘Tim’. Or what about simply rearranging the letters of the existing name that seems to most suit your child, thus preserving a notion of individuality?

So ‘Simon’ becomes ‘Somin’ or ‘Smoin’, and ‘Jane’ becomes ‘Jena’ or ‘Naje’.

No doubt this method was what resulted in the invention of the name Cnut. Presumably by some parents who didn’t exactly think the world of their new offspring.

The idea of inventing a name did appeal. The problem was the kind of names I kept making up. They just didn’t sound right:

Spettle

Ignomia

Egremont

Egremona

Earnley

Thelft

Scarnley

Higlia

Groil

Prinkear

Grindel

Trime

The most frustrating thing is that even though these names are patently ridiculous, there will always be someone who’ll like one of them.

‘Skedge? What a nice name.’

‘Fleem? Lovely. So imaginative.’

***

Relatives aren’t helpful during the naming process either, and soliciting their help is unadvisable, because it will give them early grounds for feeling rejected. Given how often one is politely going to rebuff their child-rearing suggestions in the future, there’s no point in getting the ball rolling before the little thing has even popped out. Fran’s relatives, on the male side, seemed to be drawn to rather grand names with connections to greatness. Horatio and Spartacus were suggested. Thankfully, no ideas for girls’ names were forthcoming. Fran’s mum did suggest ‘Organia’, but we think this was more of a dig at our penchant for buying organic food, rather than a real suggestion.

‘Organia? Nice name,’ said someone, though, I forget who.

A name, no matter what it is, will always be liked by someone. One of Fran’s friends even liked ‘Isambard’.

Separating ego from the naming process is impossible. When we name our child, we make a statement about ourselves, just as we do when we decide on our haircut, what clothes we pull on, and which car we drive. What do all these things
say
about us? And why do we
care
? And even if we don’t care, what does
that
say about us?

Put simply, naming your child is a nightmare. Such a nightmare, in fact, that there was a part of me that just wanted to call the baby
Child One
. The Spanish name ‘Juan’ almost allows you to get away with this.