Monday, October 13, 2008

Slump Chic

Yes it's time to come up with style notes to get through the next decade of bleak, grinding austerity. There will be a new fashion for ugly, miserable names that evoke the most hopeless days of the thirties or late forties. The Perkins family of Acton have show the way ahead. They were going to call their new daughter Britney, like everybody else in their street, but have now decided on Doris in deference to the age of abject poverty on which we are now embarking. 'If we have a boy next,' says dad Brad Perkins, 'it's got to be Reginald. In happier times, of course, we would have called him Depp.' Enid, Edith, Gladys, Oswald and Hubert are said to be high on the nomenclatural hot list.

7 comments:

  1. Rumour has it that Nigella's next series has been revamped to include meals that cost less than £285 to make.
    This morning I EMailed Edinburgh Airport and asked, as a taxpayer I will obviously be a shareholder in RBS, and therefore would they confirm that I will, of course, be entitled to use the FOC parking spaces reserved for the bank, the ones closest to the terminal building.
    As yet I have had no response.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Having children? An outrageous extravagance in this new age of austerity. Cheaper by far to have cats, Stimpy (boy) and Fluffy (girl). And put them to work at an early age catching some rats for your dinner!

    ReplyDelete
  3. It'll be interesting to see how the fabled austerity will affect the hooded masses. i presume, if they can't afford to go clubbing every night, they'll just roam the streets looking for people to kill. i suppose drug addiction will rise, but also some people will be forced to reconsider the pointless careers to which they had dedicated themselves, before the great War; not a pleasant process, i imagine.

    i foresee a great rise in pointless "I killed him 'cos I was bored, innit" street crime, lots of middle class psychological melt-downs, widespread drug addiction, and - no doubt - increasingly confident statistics from the G reassuring us that things are getting better & better under Nu Labour, that crime is down, our pupils are the brightest ever, that Gordon is the man to thank, etc. etc. etc.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Since baby names so often honor a dead relative, keeping the memory of something lost alive, I believe I know what the two favorite names in America will be:

    "Abraham" for a boy and "Penny" for a girl.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Next decade? What a cheerful fellow you are, Bryan!

    Of course, if Obama is the US president for the next 8 years he just might be able to ruin the economy for that long.

    I'm hopeful that we will climb out of this a lot sooner than that, despite Obama and his supporters.

    ReplyDelete
  6. One style note is to tell the editors of the news section of the Sunday Times to stop being so obsessed with the Mittals, Abramoviches, Saatchis etc. etc. There's acres given oven in the paper to these guys and a fundamental misunderstanding of the readership and its values. or at least people who read the paper, other than those who write for it.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Great pretended disinterest in our house this weekend in an article in the Times Saturday magazine about Miley Cyrus (called Smiley Virus by my daughters' father, much to their disgust). AKA Hanna Montana.
    The thing that interested me the most about the acres of vacuous rubbish and puffery of this weak article was the fact that M C was called "Destiny Hope" when she was born. (She later changed her name "legally" to Miley, apparently).

    "Destiny Hope" - ah, a name to conjure with.

    ReplyDelete