Kay and Derek’s ‘radicalisation’, as their daughter calls it, became impossible to ignore when they named their dachshund’s latest litter. Six males and two girls and of course they were named Nigel, Richard, Danny, Lee, Robert, Zia, Sarah and Suella. (Kay is secretly rather pleased the runt didn’t make it – she didn’t have to think about whether she would name him Rupert.) Previously their puppies had been given strictly non-political names – like Chips or Monty or Winston – and Kay had renamed Nelson when a neighbour got the wrong idea. There’s a saying about giving a dog a bad name, and you can’t call them something you can’t shout across a field without embarrassment.
That was the point when their daughter Meg stopped talking to them. They had been driven into right-wing populism by memes on Facebook, she said, and it was useless arguing with them. But it is debatable whether Kay and Derek have even noticed: Meg has been growing apart from Kay since she went to uni, and Derek, if he has considered the matter at all, assumes that her lack of contact is because she has, at last, bought her own toolbox. Their son Jonny, of course, still talks to them – he couldn’t really avoid it, working in his dad’s building company – but even he was a little disturbed by the puppies’ names. He pointed out, rightly, that Nigel is a cat’s name.
