Super-shrunk stories written for the Headway East London writers’ group Babyshoes. The idea is to compose minimal story signposts for the reader to play with. Titles are prompts agreed by the group
Heidi and Martin never talked much about having children. What they talked about instead was baby names. This usually happened when the annual surveys came out and the media went mad about it (Liam, Olivia, Noah, Emma, etc).
Paris Hilton, Romeo and Brooklyn Beckham, all those bloody Chelseas, blah
Martin was all in favour of naming newborns after the place they were born, largely because he’d long proposed it as an indicator of class snobbery – Paris Hilton, Romeo and Brooklyn Beckham, all those bloody Chelseas, blah. It was telling the world your children had provenance. Total class snobbery.
Heidi supported the Paris naming strategy too, but for a different reason. Because it would annoy Martin. With very little evidence, she would trumpet first names such as Chorley, Bradford and Carlisle. But the real glue in her argument was Mersey, the name a 1980s musician from Liverpool attached to his newborn daughter. To Heidi these were just lovely-sounding names. So they both agreed, sort of. Harmony only turned into disharmony when they were asked by expectant friends what they would call their own children.
Billy's Scrapbook 