Winning the name game

Not only is his bride as beautiful and delicate as a bluebell, but she is also discreet, educated, tastefully dressed and just the right side of quite posh.

She is also called Catherine - a first name that goes perfectly with a range of titles. From princess to duchess and from countess to lady, Catherine insinuates itself brilliantly and unobtrusively every time.

It is, truly, the Hermes handbag of Christian names, appropriate to every occasion - hinting at quality, discernment, affluence and good breeding, without having to shout too loudly about it.

If it were a scent, Catherine would be a clean, crisp, traditional chypre like Chanel No. 19 (No. 5 would be just a bit too ubiquitous). If it was a flower it would be a perfect white camellia and if it was a sandwich filling it would be smoked salmon with a light dusting of black pepper and a spritz of fresh lemon juice.

Never too trendy, but, crucially, never outdated, Catherine also goes particularly well with the word, ‘Queen’.

Of course, this is partly a happy accident of history. Some of my favourite English kings have married a Catherine. Henry V and Charles II, for example, married French and Portuguese princesses bearing the name, and Henry VIII was so enthusiastic about Catherines that he actually married three of them!

So, I suppose what I’m saying here is that for anyone who nurtures even the vaguest hope of one day trooping down the aisle or even trooping the colour with a scion of the house of Windsor, getting your name right from the earliest possible moment is vitally important.

Now, I’m not suggesting that 30 or so years ago Carole Middleton deliberately embarked on a military-style, strategic campaign to snare a prince for one of her daughters, but I do think things would have turned out rather differently had she plumped for something like Kylie, Courtney, Shaznay or maybe Jadine for her first born.

There’s nothing wrong with any of the above, of course, but just try saying them with the word queen as a prefix and I’ll see you’ll see what I’m getting at.

(Even Philippa, by the way, the name of the Middleton daughter number two has been borne by several English queens).

Writing as someone who had the great good fortune in life to christened Catherine, I feel I’m in an excellent position to comment on the name debate currently circling the princess bride.

For years we‘ve thought of her as Kate (and sometimes rather cruelly as, Waity Katy), but now it seems we’ll have to start calling her Catherine, presumably because it sounds more regal.

This is odd really, because most of us go through life shortening our names, not lengthening them.

Although regular readers will see the name Catherine at the top of this column, most of my friends and my husband call me Kate.

For years - apart from an unfortunate blip at university when a couple of chums insisted on calling me Cathy - I’d been a very determined, full-length Catherine.

Psychiatrists might speculate that I wanted to make up for shortness of person with ’longness’ of name, but I just thought it sounded better.

It wasn’t until I started work as a junior reporter on the Watford Observer and was sent on a six-month course at what was then the Westminster Press Journalist Training Centre down at Hastings, that I was forced to prune my name.

There were 50 of us on that course and ten per cent of us were called Catherine.

After the first week of law, shorthand and enthusiastic drinking sessions at various sea-front pubs (we were training to be journalists, after all), the tutors asked the five Catherines to pick different versions of our name to avoid confusion.

I chose Kate (my dad sometimes called me that anyway, so it didn‘t seem so bad) another of us went for Cathy (I was ecstatic to avoid that one), the third of us stuck with Catherine, the fourth opted for Cath and the fifth - who also worked with me at the Watford Observer and who is still a close friend - decided to re-invent herself completely by using her second name, Frances.

I suppose this tells you a couple of things about us Catherines.

One: We are very adaptable.

Two: Despite our delusions of grandeur, we have a rather common name.

It might also suggest that around 46 years ago, Catherine was a popular choice for baby girls.

At this point I’d like to be able to tell you that I was named after an English queen, a particularly heroic saint or perhaps a beautiful French film star like Catherine Deneuve.

Unfortunately the rather more prosaic truth of the matter is that I was named after Petula Clarke’s daughter, whose arrival, a couple of days before me, was trumpeted in the press.

Almost up to the moment my mum went into labour, it looked likely that my dad’s grisly choice of ‘Mary-Anne’ for a newborn daughter would win the day. My mum wasn’t at all convinced, but she was so exhausted and uncomfortable in those long hot June days back in 1963 that she couldn’t muster the energy to argue.

So, if it hadn’t been for the fact that, characteristically, I arrived two weeks late and that my mum liked ‘Down Town‘, this column might very easily have been brought to you by someone whose name suggests they would be more at home at an Amish barn raising.

I’ll be watching the royal wedding with intereston Friday to see whether Kate or Catherine wins the day.

There’s a long way from the Kate who actually worked in the trimmings section of high street chain Jigsaw, to the Catherine who might, one day, wear a crown.

But one thing I can say with total confidence about the young woman who will, hopefully, be our Queen - from the black suede boots on her feet to the feathered fascinator on her head and from the prince on her arm to the name with which she was christened, that girl really knows a thing or two about accessorising.