Naming

L's parents invited us to their beaudiful Camden Town abode to celebrate Joe's naming day on Sunday. He's eight months old, and broadly speaking we all know his name, but I guess the point is to welcome him into the world in a formal way. Suits me fine, actually, to take this sort of thing out of the church's evile graspe and ... do it with canapes. Yay!

To my enormous pride, they asked me to be godfather to Joe (cue interminable semantic jokes and musings about godlessparents, fairy godparents secular christenings etc yawn). Essentially neither parent is religious, neither am I, neither is the godmother. A made a very heartfelt speach about how it was just as important to them despite not being in anyway religious.

I don't really know if I struck the right note or not in my speech - I talked about how I wanted to be a godparent like my own godmother and to take Joe seriously as a person, and to listen to him (when he can talk, of course) rather than necessarily dispense loads of advice and moral guidance. Oh, and a few silly jokes about my Moral Compass building up to giving him a Wisden Almanack, arf arf.