The plight of naming a baby

- Jean Pierre, are your parents French?

- No, from here, from Alcorcón.

It happened in a nursery school attended by a friend's daughter.

You have to go very hard through life to put your son Jean Pierre when you don't have a single French gene.

But come to think of it, if you like the name Jean Pierre, why not give it to your son?

Life is short and full of suffering, God does not exist and nothing matters, so why not give us those little joys?

The names are changing a lot.

There are Zoes, and Noas, and Chloes, and Niles, and Enzos, and Izans.

Lifelong names like Sergio, Carmen, Rodrigo, Marta, Álvaro or Teresa will be as strange and anachronistic to new generations as Eustaquio, Remigia, Hermógenes or Visitación are to ours.

It is one of the main objectives of the relentless passage of time: to make our lives something ridiculous in the eyes of the inhabitants of the future.

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The little curse of an original name

Choosing a name for a new person is not an easy task: if done wrong it can weigh like a slab throughout the lives of our offspring, well chosen it can add significantly to their natural talents.

Therefore, many factors must be taken into account.

In my opinion, virtue is in the Aristotelian midpoint between modernity and tradition.

I think that if the person has a very common surname it is good to give them a name with more personality, common names go well with rare surnames.

I don't know if there are many cases like Rodrigo Rodríguez or Álvaro Álvarez, I know that there is a Marc Márquez, who is a motorcyclist.

There is a very traditional option, which is to give the child the name of the father, thus perpetuating the nomenclature generation after generation.

I know children who have the same name as their parents, their grandparents, their great-grandparents: it is easy to notice the weight of lineage on your own name, a burden in individualistic times.

Traditionally, the name that marked the saints has also been given (I know current cases of this practice), although it is leaving too much in the hands of fate, biology and the saints.

Let's take control of our lives, or at least that of our offspring.

Who knows, maybe in the near future people's names will resemble internet

: @Poopi_flip, Xpepe96 or Nebula.5.

It will be a beautiful world.

For our little Candela we shuffle many names, but not so many.

Liliana liked Miranda, who seemed like

or Guillermina, who to me sounded like a marquise come to less in a page of Proust.

I was in favor of bombastic mythological names, such as Andromeda, Calliope or even Terpsichore, muse of dance and choral singing.

For obvious reasons, Lili stopped me.

The first finalist name was Celeste and, in fact, before she was born, Candela was called that for a while, although she will probably never know it.

It is a poetic name and also, as her father studied astrophysics in her career, she came to her hair.

But over time it seemed a bit cheesy and a friend suggested Candela, which immediately convinced us (there were some crazy days with a compound name, the beautiful Candela Celeste, which in the end we judged excessive).

Candela seemed to us a fresh and modern name as well as traditional.

I suppose that the Candelas of yesterday were called María de la Candelaria or something like that.

In addition, it has an Andalusian air (although, surprisingly, it is rather Tenerife, where she is the Virgin of this sector), very appropriate to honor my paternal genes, and a strangely

, where Candela grew up.

Candela sounds very

, but her mother doesn't like to hear it.

The same will work if Candela turns into a shabby hippie who walks around smoking flowers as if the girl tends to be posh and spends her afternoons at contemporary art

taking selfies with pouts.

But the best thing about Candela is that she means fire.

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