What’s in a name?

As D-day (that’s due day) looms ever closer, like all expectant parents the Farmer and I are faced with one of the biggest and arguably most important decisions of our lives – what to call our daughter. Indeed, one of the reasons we chose to find out the sex of our baby was to eliminate 50 per cent of the inevitable disagreements that arise over this highly subjective issue.

Long before I had even met the Farmer, I dreamed of calling my future baby girl something beautifully exotic and different – Africa, India and Savannah were up there – but nowadays in everyone’s quest to be unique, ironically these sorts of names have become almost pedestrian. Consequently, I have found myself being drawn more towards classical names such as Grace, Jessica and Bethany.

We are both fond of Millie and Molly but are not sure how well our adolescent daughter would react to being named after one of our dogs, however beloved... Frustratingly we also agree on a lot of names not really available to us thanks to being part of two rather large families as well as the last in our circles of friends to conceive.

Like parenthood, choosing a name suddenly feels like an overwhelming responsibility because it seems bound to shape her character and personality in some way. To me, the meaning of the name is important too as is what it might get shortened (or even lengthened) to, and we obviously have to consider what goes with our surname. Then there’s still trying to be a bit original without being pretentious or worse, new-agey.

On top of all that, it’s astounding just how forthright people can be about names – particularly family. In much the same vein as the whole folk fondling your bump without asking quandary, it would seem that everyone has a bank of names better suited to our unborn baby than we, her future parents, do and aren't shy about voicing them.

Fortunately we have had largely lovely reactions to our current frontrunner, so much so that my Dad and Stepmum are already calling her by the name. However, ‘Oh no, that sounds like a cow’s name!’, was not quite the response we’d hoped for from both my own and the Farmer’s mother. ‘What about Annabel? Sophie’s a lovely name. Or Charlotte,’ they insisted, reassuring us that they’d get their thinking caps on.

‘It's so annoying! They’ve had their turn - seven times between them,’ I complain to the Farmer who, as ever, remains bullish. ‘Ignore them,’ he says, ‘My Mum wanted to call me Julian.’