In praise of old fashioned names ... and telling the sex of the baby

I wrote an article in the Guardian recently - it was very short so, hey, you probably missed it - about how much I love old-fashioned names.

When I became pregnant with my eldest son, I went through just about every name I could think of. It didn’t really help that I thought he was a girl. Everyone told me he was. I went to Reiki practioners, Shiatsu healers. I talked to a work colleague who I shall call Michelle. She was years in to the process of ‘finding herself’ and yet had seemingly found nothing out at all. She spent her life partaking in Shamanistic rituals, shedding her clothes on hilltops in the wind and then chanting.