They have destroyed a good name

It has been said that in settling on a name for their new-born child the lucky parents are handing over the first of many life tools to their child. The given name, distinguishing each one of us from all other individuals is something that most of us will make our own and take with us, wherever we go, for the rest of our lives.

The choice of name is also very important. It is one’s ‘identity’. Other people will link our name with our gender, appearance, character and other kinds of attributes. Parents will normally choose names to emphasise an individual’s positive attributes; stuff like courage, valour, honesty, intellect, faithfulness etc.

Few parents would choose ‘negative’ names for their offspring. Names that suggest negative attributes for whatever reason or names of historical people with flawed characteristics would be avoided. Why saddle a child with the baggage of a negative name and scar them for life?

These were the idle thoughts playing in Woolie’s mind as he drove home from work. It was just after 8.00am and despite the thick fog, traffic on the Shagi Road was flowing quite well. He thought of the name again. It was a six-letter name, spelt with two ‘D’s an ‘O’, ‘N’, ‘A’ and an ‘L’ a lovely name that flowed easily on the tongue…….

Oddly enough no matter how hard he tried Woolie could not come up with any larger than life characters or even remotely famous people who bore this name.

The name did not appear to be represented amongst the great and the good; the sort of people who had discovered cutting edge medicines, fantastic elements or remote islands, the brave adventurers who climbed the world’s highest peaks every other day. They were no really great leaders in the fields of politics, religion, medicine, science or sports today called Donald.

Wait….Of course there was the great actor Donald Sutherland. Then there was that American Defense Secretary serving under George W Bush at the time of the Gulf War. Rumsfeld, was it? He was the smart character who made that famous quote about ‘known unknowns’. Woolie smiled now, because he had just remembered a flamboyant and widely known character, arguably the world’s greatest promoter who had worked with boxing’s biggest names such as Muhammad Ali, George Foreman, Larry Holmes, Evander Holyfield and Mike Tyson, to name just a few…Don King

Right up to 2016 Donald had been a nice, quietly respectable name carried by thousands of decent law abiding individuals who kept a low profile and generally went with the flow.

Today things are a-stirring across the seas. Far away yonder in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave, a crazed, wild and angry man of the city came forth spewing bile and hate across the States. His foul-mouthed rants and half-baked ideas are a throwback to an ugly period in our past. He had bullied his way cross the country using money and power and today the only thing standing between this lunatic and the Nuclear codes at the Pentagon is one Hillary Clinton.

If this man should win in November will the name Donald join others like Adolf and Judas in the dustbins of disturbing first names?

Woolie eased his car into a parking space a few hundred yards from his house. He got out and went to the boot to retrieve a small shopping bag which he took with him back to the house. Once inside he took a new pair of door handles from his bag and proceeded to replace the handles on his kitchen door.

It was an easy little job and he was able to complete it in a few minutes.

Just as Woolie tightened the last screw on the handle he remembered how not so long ago he had managed to lock himself in his tiny bathroom for three days when a door handle failed. This had happened during the visit to Kenya by POTUS, Barack Obama. The aspiring Republican candidate has vowed that once elected he will deport all Kenyans from the US immediately. Perhaps Obama would be coming back, Woolie thought. This time his doors were sound. He would be in the crowd waving the President on his home coming.