The British class system seems to be all the rage at the moment. I like good period dramas about toffs, which is why I can’t bring myself to watch Downton Abbey. I did enjoy Parade’s End, primarily for the performance of Rebecca Hall, who managed to be alluring yet repulsive, wicked yet pious, hot-blooded yet reptilian, and really inhabited her part as Mrs Tietjens. She is a toff of sorts, but Roman Catholic toff, which is a different class again.
Another good bit of Parade’s End was the army camp intellectual rivalry between Tietjens and the Latin scholar, in which our hero indulges in competitive sonnet-writing. Pleasing that this sort of thing is still happening on The Dabbler – Gaw’s determination to write a limerick incorporating both ‘Hieronymus’ and ”s-Hertogenbosch’ being one of those very important pointless tasks, like finding a rhyme for ‘orange’.
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Teachers often joke about how they can tell which of their new batch of pupils will be naughty or nice simply by looking at the names in the register. So a ‘Scot’ or a ‘Lee’ will be trouble, whereas a ‘Benjamin’ or ‘Alexander’ will likely be a wee darling. This is sometimes presented as if there were something mystical attached to the names, but it is quite obviously a class prejudice. Today’s Scots and Lees might be Tylers or Rockys, and they come from poorer, ruder backgrounds than Alexanders.
I mention all this because I noticed that the top British baby names in 2011 were the impeccably middle-class Harry and Oliver for boys, and Amelia and Olivia for girls. Does this indicate that, contra widespread beliefs about chavdom, Britain is in fact a very middle-class place, full of nice children? Either that or the innovation that poorer parents often deem necessary when choosing baby names means their vote is split. But I suspect the first explanation is closer to the truth.
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To Ashbourne, an attractive, determinedly middle-class market town in Derbyshire. It has a sloping town square (spoiled by car parking) and a very large number of ye olde pubs. It might have a claim to being ‘the heart of England’. In a prim bakery I bought a handmade Gingerbread Teddy to take home for my daughter.
Possibly I felt such a bourgeois treat would counter-balance last Sunday, when I took her to Netham Park. There was an unexpected temporary funfair, the kind with unsafe-looking rides from the 1980s painted with Freddie Krueger images and barely-recognisable Diana Rosses. Staffed by men with the necessary certificates in surliness and short-changing. I gave my girl a ride on a merry-go-round (she chose, from the bewildering assortment of novelty carriages, a giant rabbit) then bought her a huge, horrible E-number confection on a stick, which kept her occupied as we went around Aldi stocking up on processed Euro cheese and Titan bars. Tietjens would not have approved. (Titan bars, for those of you who would no more set foot in Aldi than call your firstborn ‘Tyler’, are fake Mars bars, only better.)
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Netham Park would be good territory for anyone making a study of multiculturalism and recreational sports in the UK. The Caucasians and Afro-Carribeans play football, sometimes with each other. The Pakistanis play cricket. The Somalis arrive with complicated picnics and watch their infants run riot in the playpark. This time, however, I noticed one gobby Somali lad was bossing things on the concrete football court, despite his obesity and lack of skill. This bodes well: perhaps that teenage Alpha Male will be at the forefront of the future integration of what is sadly the most unassimilated immigrant community in the city. Him and Mo Farah.
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Three year-olds are natural comedians. This was my daughter in the bath, talking to her Buzz Lightyear face flannel about her new trampoline:
“Yes Buzz, you can go on my trampoline when you’re bigger…. [thoughtful pause]…. And not a flannel.”
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Back to toffs. The Duchess of Cambridge, as we now know, has her knockers – many of them in The Guardian’s Comment is Free pages. Two such knockers caught my eye this week: here Jane Martinson bangs on about the ‘hypocrisy’ of the British press in berating foreigners for publishing the topless Kate snaps while also printing Page 3 girls, as if there really was no difference between a paid model and somebody being spied upon in private property; and here Jonathan Jones argues, approvingly, that Kate’s breasts undermine “an unbroken tradition of sacral monarchy going back to the early middle ages” (Jones has lots of hyperlinks in his article to prove his scholarship, so it’s strange that he didn’t know anything about that business in the 17th Century when the ‘unbroken tradition of sacral monarchy’ included lopping the King’s head off and establishing a Republic).
I mention these articles because I worry about Comment is Free, which is overall a Good Thing and of course provides endless fodder for blogging. But from an editorial point of view, if you allow too much complete blather and dross on there, and if the trolls beneath the comment line are consistently much more sensible than the actual writers, then the value of being a ‘Guardian columnist’ must eventually erode to nothing.
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Well of course I’ve had a go at writing a limerick made of rhymes for ‘orange’…
A young Oxford student named Orange
Would mispronounce Bollinger ‘Borrenge’,
A champange-swilling swell,
He couldn’t say ‘er’ or ‘ll’,
And he read law at ‘Barriol Correnge’.
Take that, Tietjens!
A fruit of tart disposition
Set teeth on a painfull new mission
It’s pips often squeak and stick in the beak
Of consumers who make the admission
That the spherical food Is short on taste good
And the cause of the current rendition
Old Billy we moan took Englands fair throne
‘Cos the locals thought he was a smart ‘un
At Culloden they shrieked this Dutchmans fair dreach
And the colours no matching oor tartan
Bravo!
there’s nothing like a limerick – I love thinking them up, especially on long car journeys – the ruder the better!
regarding kids names – I didn’t see it myself but apparently according to the newspapers reporting on this year’s X Factor, there are contestants called Gathan, Jahmene, Shiane, and most impressively Collagen. Yes, Collagen.
Collagen pronounced in the usual way? Good grief.
Ford Maddox Ford seemed to have a bit o a thing for tall, distant Catholic toffs amongst his cast of charecters: Leonora in The Good Soldier springs to mind. They are all testy fillies; I think the womanising FMF must have taken a charge at one or two and been rebuffed.
I highly recommend Rhymes With Orange.
And, as Brit knows full well, no discussion of internet limerick challenges is complete with a pointer to the classic internet limerick challenge.
My apologies (a term that runs alongside ‘with all due respect’ as an unequivocal untruth) but CiF is not a good thing. The bulk of CiF is the digital equivalent of those who once wrote in green ink and on lined paper. The difference being that such correspondents were rightfully directed to the bin. So says an elitist, I appreciate, and others may be more democratic. Equally, perhaps more important is that CiF (and it is far, I accept, from from a solitary example) represents the sorry proof that the Guardian has abandoned every vestige of the authority that should, surely, pertain to a supposedly information-retailing newspaper. Instead we have cowardly, caviling relativism. Not, ‘this is an expert and here is his/her informed assessment’, but ‘far be it from us actually to stand by our beliefs, please, please tell us: what do you think?’ I do not care what ‘you’ think. I want Sir James Murray to review my books and failing that a living equivalent. Comment is indeed free but facts are sacred. Not opinions.
I suppose it could be said that better the devil you know, any organisation with a list of ‘contributers’ that reads like the wacky races list of runners and riders cannot be accused of forgetting to nail it’s colours to the mast. From the empty husk that is Brooker to the serially inconsistent and glaringly obvious Polly Toynbee. As for Monbiot, what can we say. In mitigation, N.Cohen is in there somewhere, pining for the days when the workers owned the means of production and them liberals was proper liberal, not a bunch of muslim extremist huggers.
Of the Guardian’s two audio-visual departments C4 news can be discounted, like Toynbee the obvious is glaring, and it appears to be staffed by the emotionally incontinent. Incidentally, what was Matt Frei thinking of. BBC news and current affairs is an altogether different proposition, the low key shadowy bias is a hemorrhoid on the backside of UKPLC. Talking of piles, is Newsnight still employing that woman.
There now, got that off me chest, it’s your fault Mr S, mentioning that newspaper.
Newsnight is indeed still employing that woman, Malty. She really slurs her words these days too.
I suppose I was sort of saying that, albeit not as forcefully.
“My other piece of advice, Copperfield, said Mr. Micawber, you know. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery. The blossom is blighted, the leaf is withered, the god of day goes down upon the dreary scene, andand, in short, you are for ever floored. As I am!”
Is this the Guardians parquet moment.
FM Ford was a Roman Catholic of sorts, though I don’t remember details of his upbringing. One of his daughters became a nun. There is something odd about Catholicism and anti-Catholicism is his fiction, but I’ve never thought it through. Is Sylvia Tietjens really depicted as “wicked yet pious, hot-blooded yet reptilian”? The piety seems a reflex of respect towards her mother’s favorite priest, the hot blood more a matter of vanity.
Shouldn’t the middle-class name be Henry rather than Harry, or are you folding the Harrys and Henrys together? An acquaintance who goes by Lee was a hellion in his younger days, but he was a “Robert E. Lee Smith”. (Odd, given that Robert E. Lee was the only man ever to graduate from West Point with no demerits.)
Just Harry, as in Potter. Henry is number 28. Full list here.
Curious that the Harrys should so outnumber the Henrys and the Sophies the Sophias.
In my eldest’s London primary school class there are so many Joshua, Olivers and Oscars that they need to be differentiated by first initial of surname. The social spread is across the board too. I wonder whether socially mixed inner city primary schools are the vector for posh names to make their way down the social scale?
I’m very aware of current name trends because we and all our friends are having babies, and the proliferation of Evies, Graces, Roses, Lilys and other floral names suggest a perhaps 80 year fashion cycle – these are the names of their great-grandmothers.
What surprises me most about that list is the way that the most common boys names of my generation have plummeted. Every football team I’ve played in has had several Daves, Andys. Johns and Steves. John is 100 on the list and my own name has dropped out completely.
yep, I have had to fight tooth and nail with the missus over names as she likes all the usual current ones and I am adamant that we shouldn’t have any children who’s names can be pinpointed to a certain time period or trend – “Oh, you were born in the great Oliver epidemic of 2012, I’m from the Rosie outbreak of that year too”
But, worm, your boy has a name that’s definitely going to be associated with this period. I’ve know a few. And I bet it will become much more popular in the next five years too. It’s a great name by the way – shared with my Dad, great-uncle and great-grandfather.
I think it’s almost impossible to escape the zeitgeist unless you deliberately go unfashionable, i.e. Dave, Andy, Steve, John.
Interesting how William is always there or thereabouts, but its form changes. So right now there are a lot of Billys. My generation had Wills. The generation before and the one before that had Bills. James (Jim, Jamie) and John (Jonny, Jack, Jake) are similar but the former seems totally in eclipse right now.
oh I know worm jr.’s name is teetering on the verge of being trendy, as I said, it was a compromise! Apparently its at around number 50 in this year’s hot list which I thought was respectable. What a shame I was vetoed with my first choice of ‘Mungo’ 🙁
My top two picks were Odilon and Jonquil.
I recently heard Barry Humphries saying he hated ‘Barry’ because it immediately dates him.
The ones I find problematic are the cutesy ones. Things like ‘Benjy’ and ‘Lillie-May’ in my circle of acquaintance. Lovely for babies but you have to remember they grow into adults and may at some stage need to be taken seriously.
At No1 Tochter’s school there were three sisters, Portia, Jocasta and Henrietta. As you would expect, today one works for Barclays finance another has a marketing company and the third got married, to an enormous bank balance. Funny thing was, their surname was as common as muck.
Favourite girls names..Dita or Gertrude, boys..Edgar.
Is that Edgar as in Lance Armstrong, Malty?