So my wife’s preg­nant. Now that the mind-numbing hor­ror has gone, and before the dreaded num­ber threes start, there’s the epic task of not only pick­ing but also agree­ing on pos­sible names.

We agreed on a girl’s name pretty quickly — I’m not going to tell you what it is because if you steal it we’ll be back at square one — but a good boy’s name that we both agree on has so far proved elusive.

The con­ver­sa­tions usu­ally go some­thing like this: I’ll come up with a per­fectly good, strong, mean­ing­ful name, and she’ll screw her nose up in a way that says “my ini­tial reac­tion is ‘no’ and I refuse to con­sider it fur­ther”. Then she’ll come up with some cliché, deliberately-badly-spelt-because-it-makes-it-seem-more-“exotic” name, to which I’ll screw my nose up in a way that says “I think it’s funny that I’m imit­at­ing your man­ner­isms but I’m acutely aware that it actu­ally just makes me look like a twat”.

Usually we’ll get through one or two more of these back-and-forths before we run out of ideas and I start sug­gest­ing some­thing silly like Smeagle or Chewbacca.

But ser­i­ously, who wouldn’t want to name their kid after this.