So-called names and such!

Sometimes you can really be led to wonder how people come to have the names they do. And it's not just the chavs either. The toffs are as bad. How does Santa Sebag Montefiore come by that name? Well, the surname obviously comes from marrying the historian and posh tv history programme maker Simon of that name. But who calls their female child Santa? Weird!

I came across her name while reading about her sister Tara Palmer-Tomkinson, who has just died at the age of 45. Friend of Prince Charles and other, younger members of the royal family, recovered drug addict and former "It" girl, she served to show that being born with it all doesn't mean you get to live happily ever after.

What is an It girl anyway? According to Wikipedia: ""It Girl" is slang for a beautiful, stylish young woman who possesses sex appeal without flaunting her sexuality. The phrase is believed to have originated as in British upper class society around the turn of the 20th century. An early literary usage of the term "it" in this context may be traced to a 1904 short story by Rudyard Kipling: "It isn't beauty, so to speak, nor good talk necessarily. It's just 'It'."

There you go!

I read today about people whose lives and relationships have been turned upside down by the way people voted in the US elections. One couple, now in their sixties, have separated after 22 years because she could not bear the fact that he had voted for Donald Trump. She always knew that they had very different views about a whole lot of things but this was a step too far. Others no longer speak to certain members if their family unless absolutely necessary. I can understand that. I "unfriended" a number of people on Facebook after the referendum. And I have a cousin who I did not unfriend (he is a cousin, after all, and a link to other family members) but took measures to stop his stuff popping up on my page after he posted that he thought the birch and other forms of corporal punishment should be reintroduced! We are in the 21st century, when all is said and done.

This being the 21st century does not, of course, guarantee that we behave in a civilised way. As someone called Chris Edelson pointed put in the Baltimore Sun newspaper the other day (I somehow come across articles from odd newspapers around the world) it was ordinary Americans who carried out inhumane acts for their president at airports which were not allowing certain people into the USA. They handcuffed a five-year-old boy and a 65-year-old woman, no doubt both seriously likely to carry out acts of violence on the spot. The little boy was kept away from his mother for several hours; maybe she would coach him so that he gave acceptable answers! A woman and her small children were held for almost a day without food. No doubt there are further examples.

The journalist went on to say that these employees, people like you and me, probably went home and kissed their wives and read bedtime stories to their children. All this with a clear conscience; they were just doing their job after all. I think we might have heard that excuse before!

One of my nodding acquaintances around the village blames Trump for everything. If the weather is bad: the Trump effect! If there is no lettuce on the shelf: the Trump effect! Even if he forgets what he went to the co-op for in the first place: the Trump effect!

And, finally, here is a link to a series of photos quietly making fun of the so-called president.