Morrisons aren’t doing very well at the moment, according to the business community; shares have dropped to their lowest since 2009. One broker told clients that Morrisons was ‘haemorrhaging market share and has a pricing problem requiring painful margin cuts to fix’. Ouch. Morrisons’ poor performance can be partly blamed on a reluctance to engage in online trading and lack of convenience stores (such as Tesco Express), but it comes down to too many gimmicks and not enough value. The public aren’t all mugs; and in a comparison of basket item prices in The Grocer last month, the Morrisons basket cost more than Asda’s, Tesco’s, Sainsbury’s, and even Waitrose’s. It has also emerged that the Morrison family are trying to buy back the business; I had read previously that they didn’t like the direction in which the company was going. Perhaps they don’t like their name being taken in vain.
And names are a bit of a vexed subject at the moment. A short while back, an opinionated female called Katie Hopkins got into trouble for suggesting that some names were more ‘middle-class’ than others, and that you could often tell from children’s names whether their parents were chavs. The Times, while carefully not agreeing, followed this up with a report from an American professor which suggested that teachers were subconsciously affected by childen’s names, and kids called Kayleigh, Destiny, and Hayden were less likely to do well than those called Laura or William. The professor said, quote, ‘Teachers…draw inferences about kids’ backgrounds from…their names. From the sound and spelling of a name, you can predict that the child’s mother probably dropped out of school or was a university graduate and everything in between’.
Not sure about that, but a brief trawl of baby name websites shows an awful lot of strange choices out there. At the moment, the top names are, depending on where you look, Harry and Olivia, or Jackson and Ava; not too bad, you might think, but then you come across Jayce, Aiden, Caden, and Brayden (for boys; Hayden is apparently for both boys and girls). And Mackenzie or Finley, for a girl? Oh, wait, in one list Finley is 28th for girls AND 31st for boys. And in the States, Sincere and Adonis (yes, really) are proving popular. Still, they’ve got to be better than poor North West, offspring of Kanye West, or George Foreman’s four sons, all called George. (His daughter is – wait for it – Freeda. With a double e.) And one actress has called her recently-born son Audio Science.
One website suggests helpfully that you avoid unfortunate combinations of first name and surname, such as Tamara Knight. A girl posted that her mother was going to call her Hayley, but didn’t think Hayley Daly would work, so opted for Siobhan instead. (She doesn’t seem to like that either, and calls herself Sam). I always thought that that was why Jerry Hall didn’t marry Bryan Ferry. And my friend Will Yemm often got into trouble when asked for his name: Will Yemm what? In Africa, they have a tendency to name children after anything that takes their fancy, so you have kids called Sparkplug Johnson or Goodluck Jonathan. Goodluck Ebele Azikiwe Jonathan, actually, and he’s the current President of Nigeria.
Bloomer of the week has to go to last Saturday’s Times; in a long-running series describing ‘good walks’ around the British Isles, this one featured Somerset, with, quote, ‘flatlands and hill ranges spread out before us, a feast of West Country landscape’. And it didn’t even suggest taking wellies, let alone scuba and snorkel. Much the same as the talking head explaining the Jet Stream on TV, who concluded: ‘We should expect more winters like the ones we’ve had in the years ahead’. Well, yes, winters are a fairly permanent fixture.
Today’s saint is St Barbatus of Benevento, a seventh-century Italian Bishop who fought idolatry by knocking down local temples to build a defensive wall against invaders. Practical, and it worked. So far so good; but Wikipedia goes on to say that even today, on his feast day, in his hometown ‘there is the traditional “Day of Thunder”, a competition between three pyrotechnic disabled firemen’. Something must have got lost in translation; but I’d love to see it.