Name?

To all of you helped with my duck dilemma, thank you. They will now be the happiest and healthiest mallards in the county.

Unless you're an expert (or a duck) one duck looks much like another, so I only give names to the very conspicuous ones with unusual markings. We had Archie, Becky, Clive, Dora, Edwin, Florrie... then I got confused, and gave up at Kevin. But I do like naming things. As you may know, the laptop is Cottontail.

I meet lots of children, what with church things, school things, and friends. At present I keep meeting Marcuses, Ethans, Thomases, and Noahs. Among the girls, Eve, Ruby, and Lily are among the old-fashioned names making a comeback. Daisy, too, so we may be seeing a return to those lovely old flower names. My grandma was just plain Ethel, but her sisters were Rose, May, Lily, Ivy, Iris, Pansy, and Olive.

One fo the fun things about being an author is finding the right names for characters. It's a good sign when they turn up having chosen their names already. In The Octave of Angels, I had a little girl from the past called Myrrh, and a contemporary one called Berry. I thought that was ridiculous. You don't give children names like that. But they sort of swam out from somewhere at the back of my mind with their names already chosen. They knew who they were. And when I'd thought about them, and worked out their back stories, so did I.