I love my family. They are exceptionally important to me. My immediate family is a fixed point in my universe to which I return to lick my my wounds, share news, both good and bad, to celebrate my successes. But they are mad. In a good way. They have this propensity to cleave to the same or similar names. Let me clarify:

My oldest sister is called Ginnie and my sister-in-law is called Ginny.
My other sister is called Julia, but Ginnie named her first-born Julia too.
Then comes Ginnie’s son Matthew Johnson, followed by Julia’s son, Matthew Gibson.
Next come the Ems. My brother, David’s daughter, Emily and Julia’s daughter, Emma.
So until my daughter, Isla, came along, my parents either had grandchildren of the same or similar names or named for one of their children.
Add to this the fact that if you include my ex-husband’s family, then I also had 2 nieces called Catherine and a brother-in-law called Anthony and a nephew called Anton.

An aside here:
My family all met for a fantastic holiday in a wonderful hotel that my parents loved in the South of France. This was some years ago now, before my mother died. The two Matthews became firm friends, although more than ten years apart in age. But this did not stop them being fiercely competitive. And the knotty problem that reared its head was that they both liked to go by the name of Matt. This was proving awkward. Both either answered to or ignored the appellation in equal measure. That was until Matt Gibson announced to his senior cousin, Matt Johnson one day:
” You can be Big Matt, I’ll be Small Matt. Then, when we are older, you can be Matt Sr. and I’ll be Matt Jr. Then after that it won’t matter!”
When Matt Johnson enquired why it wouldn’t matter, he was told:
“Because I’ll be Matt and you’ll be Dead Matt!”

Back to my story. The youngest child of Isla’s generation is my brother’s son. I was the first to meet him. I was going to stay with my parents because my friend and I were exhibiting at a craft fair so dropped in on my brother en route. He and Ginny had come back from hospital that morning. He was gorgeous and I was pleased to hear that they intended to call him Charlie. It was one of the names that I had considered if I had had a son. However, my brother and I decided to play a practical joke on my mother in particular.

When we arrived at my parents, we were barely through the door when my mother started quizzing me about her latest grandson. Finally, she got around to asking the burning question.
“Have they named him?”
I looked down and away from her. I shuffled about. Eventually, after a suitably anguished silence, I said, “Yes, but you won’t like it!”
“Why?”, was the response.
I took a deep breath in and said, “We’ll, they took one look at him and decided that there was only one name that suited him (I took a substantial pause to draw breath here, to heighten the tension)
“And?”
“Well, they’ve decided to call him Matthew.” I gushed on a hurried out breath.

The effect this pronouncement had was instant and gratifying. Both my parents were appalled, but my mother, normally an inordinately patient woman, and the most non-judgmental person I have ever met, went ballistic. Orbital.
“WHAT?”, she exclaimed. “Are you the only one of them who isn’t delusional?”, she said. “What are they thinking? THREE grandsons, all called Matthew??!!”

She rang my brother to berate him. David kept up the pretence. He claimed that they had decided on a couple of other names, but when he was born, he just looked like Matthew. She went into meltdown and was unamused when I pointed out that she was unlikely to forget their names…

My father kept on trying to calm her down. He kept on racking his brains to put a positive spin on the fact that all their grandsons had the same name. You could hear my mother coming. She would approach, muttering under her breath, “It’s mad! Quite mad!” Or “Ridiculous!”

We kept the pressure up for several days. We only relented when our mother stopped commenting on this appalling state of affairs and headed towards what could only be classed as ‘resigned’ or worse still, ‘inconsolable’……