It’s not the worst thing our prime minister has done, but it feels like he and his wife are trolling me by calling their child Romy
“I have a suggestion and I’m not sure you’re going to like it,” my wife said, one evening in 2016. I knew what was coming. My wife isn’t someone prone to suggesting we suddenly up sticks and move to Arkansas, or begin new careers in mime artistry. And we’d been talking about names for our imminent first child. Girls’ names had been a particular problem: we’d ended up with a rotating cast of names from Mad Men – Peggys and Bettys and the like – but weren’t fully convinced. I braced myself for a “Gertrude”.
“What about Romy?” she said. Instantly, I loved it. The name’s roots are basically a Germanic twist on the Latin name Rosemary, but it seems to be more popular in France these days. My wife had been following the rather glam daughter of the editor of French Vogue on Instagram, who called her own daughter Romy. As it turned out, I’d recently done a phone interview with Romy from the xx and was struck by how lovely she’d been to chat to.
Tim Jonze is the associate editor of Guardian Culture
