The other night at work a colleague was enquiring about our daughter and asked how we came up with the name Bethany for her. Saying that it was one of the few names we could both agree on he replied "Did your wife say 'I like Beth' and you replied 'I like Any'?" I did think I should mention some of my thought processes for my part in the naming should Bethany wish to know at a later date and I am no longer able to remember.
   Initially the middle name of Anna came first after deciding to call her after Alison's mother. I like this use of the middle name to give a nod to other family but do not like using it as a first name as there is obviously already one of those and aside from causing confusion I would like any offspring unburdened by any comparisons and be a person in their own right. After selecting the middle name this automatically ruled out any first name beginning or ending in the letter A to avoid alliteration, which I am not keen on, and to prevent her two christian names running into each other. This rule also stopped me thinking of names beginning with M to prevent clashes with the surname. I had already ruled out A as her mother has this initial and to avoid any future confusion with post addressed to A Marshall had decided against this letter as well as R due to my initial. To avoid further running of names with Anna certain names such as Joanne or Dianne clashed and were therefore overlooked as were a number of names I liked but when said quickly together with her middle name sounded like an Italian version e.g. Lucy becoming Luciana.
   My other big gripe was that it should be a proper girl's name and not a feminized version of a man's name which eventually ruled out one of the wife's favourites and the name she was nearly going to be called until her birth: Charlotte. Despite reassurances that my wife would use Lottie instead of Charlie I did not feel comfortable - luckily for me then that when she was born my wife decided that "She doesn't look like a Charlotte." This basically left Bethany as the only name we could really agree upon. An added factor was that without actually naming her after my Nanna Betty the Beth does provide a nod to her given name of Elizabeth.
   After all that effort it was somewhat surprising that for the first couple of days I called her Bertha (I did have a great aunt of that name but not a name that had ever cropped up in possible names). Whilst I might blame the tiredness and excitement of the occasion to mash Bethany and Anna together briefly my wife managed to remember our daughter's name perfectly well and could lay claim to be more emotionally and physically drained by the whole experience. Even harder to explain is where I got Gertie from which I also used on a couple of occasions in her early days.