JOST A MON

Just the other day, two million residents of Scotland decided to stick with the union. For a bit there it appeared that secession was on the cards. It was a briefly thrilling moment - how many people can say they've lived through that? Independence is a stirring word. But the dissolution of centuries of union felt like a manifest tragedy. As a more-or-less unbiased bystander, I had mixed feelings about the referendum.

The idealogical contradictions on both sides were apparent to me, as I'm sure they were to many others. On the conservative side, for the people who believe in nationalism and pride in one's country, in self-rule and distance from that other union, the EU, the idea of Scotland removing itself from the UK was horrifying. How dare they, went the cry. For the leftists who clamoured for Scottish independence it was no less a contradiction: for them nationalism is anathema and the universal brotherhood of peoples is a more unifying force than political division, and yet they wanted liberal Scotland to overthrow the 'establishment' politics of Westminster. In the end, neither of them have received quite what they wanted - no independence but a further federalism of the UK, and who knows how many more fissiparous tendencies engendered.

There's talk now of London and the other big cities getting more control of revenues and spending. The Cornish would no doubt love a bit of a parliament of their own. The Welsh, for so long a forgotten appendage to the English, perhaps would want to govern themselves. As for the English - do they want yet another burdensome government and bureaucracy on which to spend their taxes?

The journalist Mark Grigorian used the Scottish referendum as a touchpoint of civility and political sophistication. He pointed out that the ruling government did not try to use the media to stamp out secessionary talk, or send the police to suppress the dissidents, or snatch the ballot, or indeed indulge in any of the actions that scared governments across the rest of the world indulge in when faced with a popular uprising. He pondered how the secessionary movement in Nagorno-Karabakh might have played out had the Azerbaijani and Armenian nations stuck to a civilised modus operandi. But while for the rest of the world the Scottish referendum may appear as a high mark in politics, for those who went through it, the psychological wounds would perhaps take longer to heal.

It occurs me to me that the list of books I've read over the past 31 years can be treated as a source of names. Because the vast majority are from the English-speaking world, the names, too, are a spectrum of English Christian names. I thought I might plot the lot to see what patterns might emerge.

So here's what I did: I read into an R session the names of all my authors, removed duplicates (1844 names remaining), extracted the first names, and removed all those that have only an initial (e.g. 'J.'). I ended up with 1610 first names, not all distinct, of course. Here's a random selection of them: Robin, Marta, Michael, Hanif, Brian.

Observe the Hanif (Qureishi). Not a Christian name, what?

Of these 1610 names, 637 only occur once. These are names like: Wladyslaw, Vernor, Slavenka and Pamela.

Here's a barplot of the names that occur more than once.

The labels are not very clear unless you click through and zoom. Bit of a pain, that. 

So let me do this: I'll split the plot into 4 chunks.

Unsurprisingly, the top names are all male - I think I documented elsewhere that I've read far more books by men than by women. What's interesting is that the most popular female name is Mary (9 times) and there are twenty-two male names that occur more often than that, until the most popular male name of John (46 occurrences).

This is still a tad irregular, because obviously there are names like Tom and Thomas, or Will and William, and Marie and Maria and Mary which are variants: should these be treated as different? These days there's a vogue for erstwhile diminutives to be treated as true names (there are a few Charlies I know - and they assure me they are not Charles's; likewise, Jack is an immensely popular name now). The combining of the variants into one class is not something I can do automatically with a bit of coding magic, so I have to create a new list manually.

Here I'm a bit baffled again. Are Andrea, Andrew and Andrei the same? Is every Alex an Alexandra? Some could be Alexander, of course, while others might be Alexis or Alexei. Unless I look into the antecedents of each of the names, I'm not going to be able to make much progress here.

Let me make some hand-waving assertions, though.

If I club Ann, Anna, Anne and Annie into one class, then there are 14 of these.

If I club Dan and Daniel, then there are 10 of these.

Daves and Davids together are 32.

Erics and Erichs together are 10.

Freds, Fredericks, Friedrichs together are 10.

George and Georges together are 20.

Geoffrey and Jeffrey together are 7.

Helen, Helene and Helena together are 7.

Iain and Ian total 17.

Jack and John and Johann together are 51.

Jose, Joe and Joseph together are 14.

Mary, Marion, Marie, Maria and Mari are 13.

Mike, Mikhail, Michael, Michele, Mikael and Miguel total 35.

Niccolo, Nicholas and Nick total 12.

Bob, Robert, Roberto are 30.

Stephen, Steven, Steve and Stefan are 26.

Thomas and Tom are 17.

Will, William, Willem and Bob are 25.

So what do we have?

The most popular women's names are now Ann and Mary and Helen and Jane, in that order.

The most popular men's names are John, Michael, David, Robert, Stephen, William.

Now, this website gives the top names in the US from 1900-2000. Observe that John, Michael and David were very popular in the early years, but gradually drifted down until only Michael and William remained in the top 10 in 2012. Between 1980 and 1990, John waned (heh).

Among women, Mary vanished from the top 10 in 1970; Anna and Helen were in the top 10 before the 1930s; Jane doesn't even figure in the list.

For some reason, the Scots have kept records of popular names over the last century (John tops the list till 1975, after which it plummets; Mary, Helen and Annie fade from the 1950s). Given that England and Wales have had censuses for yonks, I'm a bit puzzled that I can't readily find UK-wide statistics. Perhaps I'm not looking too closely.

But here's the thing! The Johns in my list - Bowers (1928- ), Brunner (1934-1995), Buchan (1875-1940), Creasey (1908-1973), Derbyshire (1945- ), Dickson Carr (1906-1977), Gribbin (1946- ), Fuller (1913-1990), Grant (1949- ), Grisham (1955- ), Harvey (1938- ), Norwich (1929- ), Kay (1948- ), Keay (1941- ), Lanchester (1962- ), Lawton (1949- ), le Carré (1931- ), Ford (1951-2006), Man (1941- ), Masters (1914- ), Mortimer (1923- ), McWhorter (1965- ), Reader (1937- ), Steinbeck (1902-1968), Wheeler (1911-2008), Wyndham (1903-1969) - are nearly all born in the heyday of the name. If I had the puff to look at the authors born after 1970, I'd probably find very few Johns.

On the other hand, the Anns in my list - Digby (1935- ), Weale (1929-2007), Frank (1929-1945), Dukthas (*), Lamott (1954- ), Tyler (1941- ), Fadiman (1953- ), Stothard (1983- ), Reid (1965- ), Cleeves (1954- ), Dee Ellis (??), Perry (1938- ), Proulx (1935- ), Maria Ortese (1914-1998) - are exceptions - most of them were born after the name's popularity dropped in the 1930s.

Make of it all what you will!

(* - Ann Dukthas is a pseudonym of Paul C. Doherty.)

For some reason I cannot fathom, the local library has an occasional memoir among its fiction books.  Perhaps the librarians have a crafty cynicism? Some of these books are less than 200 pages long and I pick them up as part of my rampage through the shelves. To be honest, I pick one up - Rod Humphries' The Last Coal Trip to Tenby. I am not happy. It reads like a transcript of oral recollections. It is punctuated badly and the grammar is often awful. It is an interesting story of vanishing life in Wales just before the Second World War. It has rugby and eccentric characters. It has bibliophiles and religious nuts. It has avid drinkers and outdoors toilets. It has sporadic references to Welsh food. It would have done much better as a period comedy on TV.

In fact, my latest stash of borrowings have been singularly under par. Even vaunted writers such as Yasushi Inoue and Janet Frame and Shirley Hazzard have underwhelmed. The last of these wrote Cliffs of Fall, and Other Stories, which explores the emotional relationships between women and men in a series of short stories set in various parts of the world. Every one of her characters appears to have the same emotional maturity; they speak in similar voices; their introspection is identical irrespective of age. Every story deals with some sort of breakup, usually prompted by the (emotionally unavailable) men, sometimes by death. It's as though Hazzard feels that she can only extract nuances of human behaviour from unhappy people. Clearly she has taken Tolstoy to heart.


Yasushi Inoue's The Hunting Gun is one of the masterpieces of Japanese literature. I don't get it.


I exaggerate a tad. Pleasure was had from Zoë Heller's first novel Everything You Know, which has one of the most acerbic misanthropes I've encountered in the past year or so. His hatred of London and New York is so intense and so exquisitely described that any reader who hasn't been to these cities would probably never want to visit. He has a troubled relationship with his daughters (one of whom kills herself) and in his youth had served time for the murder of his wife (acquitted on appeal). Despite his dislike for people in general, and contempt for the women in his life, he occasionally does feel pangs of sympathy for them, and he tries to do the right thing. Of course, his good work is invariably thrown back in his face. No wonder he staggers through life despising everyone. Heller does like an optimistic ending, though. I'd have preferred the man to die filled with his bitterly dark humour.


Oh, and Günther Freitag's Brendel's Fantasy is another exploration of a man's mortality. Like Heller's protagonist, Freitag's - Höller - is dying as well, and he is determined to go with a bang. He feels that every musical masterpiece has an ideal location suited to it, where it must be played to extract every ounce of its beauty. He is convinced that the great pianist Alfred Brendel is the man to play Franz Schubert’s Wanderer Fantasy, his favourite piece. Retiring to a little town in Tuscany, he senses that here's where he'll stage Brendel's performance of the piece. The novel follows Höller's efforts to establish a venue deserving of the Fantasy. Naturally he faces incomprehension, dismay and unsavoury characters as he tries to bring his life's desire to fruit.


I'm past the letter 'I' and heading 'K'-wards... Katie Kitamura! Happy days.