Most of my social circle consists of people I've been roleplaying with since University, and it's been interesting to observe how things have changed over the years. As we all got older, most of us have got jobs and started accumulating things that cost money: suits, animals, computers, cars, houses.
Babies.
Mike (of SomeWhat fame) and Shona have just had their first baby, shortly after paying off their mortgage; his name is Jonathan Douglas Charleston, which trips nicely off the tongue, and doesn't at first glance to seem to lend itself to any obvious playground bastardisations. Mother and baby are, according to reports, fine - the whole thing took roughly 2 hours, which is amazingly good luck, and a sure sign that when they have their next kid it will take absolutely ages.
(There almost certainly will be a second kid: Mike didn't sound too convincing when he suggested they might quit when they were ahead, especially when he refused to tell me what they might have called the child if it had been a girl, on the grounds that they might use those names later. Mike: let me know if it turns out you were going to pick the 2003 equivalent of Sharon or Tracy.)
According to the rhyme, as Cleodhna pointed out, Wednesday's child is full of woe, which is pretty rough on him, as I don't believe you can be a goth if you're called Jonathan. And annoyingly, his birthday is far more numerologically interesting in the broken bastardised data format Merkins use (06/04/03). Bah.
I know a couple of people who have spawned already (Danny, for instance), but Mike is the first person I a) know pretty damn well, and who b) really meant to have a baby. Which is slightly scary, even if Mike is older than most of us - I mean, he works for a stockbroker (albeit a stockbroker who deals with funky brain-hurting maths), who gave him a lift home this afternoon in, according to stereotype, a flash convertible. I look forward to future developments with interest - like, for instance, how long it takes for young Jonathan to outweigh our own surrogate child Laszlo.
Incidentally, I vaguely thought of buying a domain - jonathancharleston.me.uk or something - to commemorate the birth of Mike and Shona's first child, in the same sort of way that my mother plants a tree whenever my cousins have babies. But I decided against it, on the grounds that a domain name should be your own choice: it's going to be (potentially) part of your identity for life, so it should damn well be something that you're happy with.
So firstsprog.com remains unregistered. For now.
