In the days before it became independent, I went to King Edward’s School, Birmingham, then a so-called direct grant school that took in a combination of state-funded and fee-paying children. In spite of our moderately mixed backgrounds, there was a certain uniformity about our first names. Nearly all of them were drawn from a pool of long-established favourites: David, Paul, Andrew, Mark, John, Christopher and so on. The only exception I recall was a boy called Jason who, although obviously in no way to blame for his name, came in for remorseless teasing over its perceived pretentiousness.

Today I have children of my own, attending a London state primary school. Each morning, as I take them to their classrooms, I’m struck not just by the extraordinary diversity of the names above the pupils’ pegs – London, after all, is a multi-cultural community – but by the fact that, within a single generation, the entire pantheon of age-old English names borne by me and my contemporaries has been more or less wiped out.