Will Klay Rooney thank his father Wayne for his name? The Rooneys" inspiration could well be the Kardashian family, the US reality TV stars. Mother Kris called her daughters Khloe, Kourtney, Kim, Kendall and Kylie. A tad repetitive, you might think, but still not a patch on boxing legend George Foreman who, apparently mistaking himself for British royalty, named his sons George Jr, George III, George IV, George V and George VI. Not forgetting their sisters, Georgetta and Freda George. Foreman did offer a sound explanation for this: "If you're gonna get hit as many times as I've been hit by Mohammad Ali, Joe Frazier, Evander Holyfield - you're not gonna remember many names." I sympathise with George. As we get older and the brain cells harden like ancient toffee Revels at the bottom of a handbag, we tend to call our children by their siblings" names anyway. I am invariably Kathryn to my mother. And school name-tapes would be a doddle if your brood shared the same initial. But I'm still not convinced that an offspring's name is any place for parents to express their personality. More than a tattoo on an adult, a wacky name can mark a child for life - especially a poor white child - as if the educational divide were not damaging enough. In Britain, the widening gulf between rich and poor is nowhere clearer than in the choices on the nation's birth certificates. Time was when the son of a labourer and a Lord might both be called Anthony, and a classless Tony could travel anywhere. A Margaret could be a dinner lady or a prime minister. No longer. Today, Ryan is the eighth most popular name among footballers and the sixth most popular overall among boys who are 18, but not a single Ryan appears in the 50 top names of Oxford undergraduates. Never before have names told us so much so quickly about a person's background. Perhaps we need to update George Bernard Shaw's maxim: "It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him." Nowadays, just a Kalvin or a Kacey on a job application will do. When I had my first baby 17 years ago, the trend was for middle-class mums to give their boys good, staunch names like Jack and Arthur. Our NCT tea group sounded like a branch meeting of Aslef. About the same time, working-class families were ditching those lovely old-fashioned names and looking to soaps and the States for inspiration. Cue "fierce" names like Tequila, Cougar and Swayze, after the late actor Patrick, a name landed on the blameless heads of five baby boys in 2011. There are 50 per cent more baby names on the national register than there were 25 years ago, and it's fair to say not all of them are an improvement on Janet and John. Take the dismissive Eh, which 14 poor girls were named last year. Eh? Yes, really. I suppose it's only a matter of time before we hear the first Whatever ring out across our local park. What's in a name? Pretty much everything, sadly. The chance of going to university, the job you get, even your life expectancy. We live in an apartheid of names and the selfish, daft, embarrassing choices made by the famous are largely to blame. As a celebrity baby, Klay Rooney will enjoy a special, quasi-royal status. His name will not restrict his future as it will the lives of all the little Klays named after him; boys who lack a millionaire footballer dad to insulate them from life's unfairness. Will the Rooneys continue the K theme and provide Kai and Klay with yet more sibilant siblings: Kamilla, Klarc, Klapham, Kwikfit, Khazi? Or will they choose a name their kids can take anywhere? It's time to bring back sensible, classless names like John, Peter and Valerie. Why do I pluck those names at random from the air? Memo to celebrities: if you insist on choosing a name like a bad hand of Scrabble, get a dog. When same-sex marriage came up on the radio, the Small Boy ceased munching his Sugar Puffs and put down his spoon. I knew it had to be a matter of some import. "How weird to be against gay marriage," he declared, "it's like..." He searched for the worst word he could think of. It's like racism. Not exactly racism, I said. "Homophobia!" he shrieked, producing a word from his school PPS lesson. I explained that many people, particularly those his grandparents" age, would see it very differently. Homosexuality didn't become legal in this country till 1967. For certain religious people, marriage is something between a man and a woman. It offends their beliefs. "Well, they're just wrong," said the Daughter, our Visiting Barbra Streisand Professor of Gay Studies. "They altered the Constitution to abolish slavery, so they can change marriage so gay people like my friend F feel less crap about themselves," she snapped. How did I come to be living with two swivel-eyed gay rights fundamentalists? They are more rigid and unyielding than the Taliban. Same-sex marriage has been cast as a party political row. It isn't. It's generational. Polls confirm that 85 per cent of people under 45 would be more likely to vote for a party that supports gay marriage, but only 10 per cent of over-60s would. Me, I worry what it means for the definition of marriage when all the major religions see it as being about procreation of children. My kids think it's a no-brainer. When I suggest to the Daughter and her friends that an elderly churchgoing lady might find gay marriage shocking, one says: "No offence, but she'll be gone soon. It's about setting an example to show us how to behave when our time comes to make the decisions. The tolerant can be mighty intolerant, no? Neither young nor old, I find myself swinging between the two views. I hate the way David Cameron forced an issue where none existed. As a gay friend said: "The point of being gay is that you don't bloody have to get married." And yet, I find the children swaying me with their passionate conviction. The Daughter says that F's mother cried when he told her he was gay. She wasn't shocked, she said she was scared that life would be really hard for him. He's a lovely boy, is F, and one day he will make a fantastic dad, partner, husband, whatever they call it by then. The future belongs to him and his generation. Whether we like it or not, that future began with the vote in favour of same-sex-marriage on Tuesday. As they said on Eurovision: "You may now kiss the groom." The biggest news coming out of the Cannes Film Festival this year has not been a film at all. Instead, the talk has been of Marion Cotillard's hair, as styled for the red carpet. By any standards, it was a bit of a do: such a towering beehive that it could have been constructed by actual bees. Were there little French drones buzzing round inside it, keeping it honey-sweet throughout the evening? In any case, the lovely maid Marion accompanied it with a long Dior dress that was half-waterfall, half-ice lolly, in tones that ranged - not unlike the history of cinema - from black and white to startling colour. As for the movie that Marion was promoting, who cares? It was directed by her husband, but his noble efforts were overshadowed, literally, by what was happening on top of his wife's head. The elegant up-do is enjoying a long overdue revival, with YouTube even featuring a Sock Bun tutorial - how to create a ballerina's top-knot by cutting the toes off a sock and rolling it in your hair. NB: do not use husband's work socks. Not since the prime of Dusty Springfield has gravity been defied with such grace. Hive action is back! So He Who Cannot Be Sacked has agreed to "retire" next year. Has Sir David Nicholson, the chief executive of the English NHS, seen the error of his ways? As the former head of the local health authority, has he accepted that he must take responsibility for 1,200 unnecessary deaths at Stafford hospital as a result of a fearful targets culture that saw patients left in their faeces and drinking water from flower vases? Is Sir David now ashamed of the curious memory loss that saw him deny any recollection of Gary Walker informing him that he wanted to blow the whistle about safety at United Lincolnshire hospitals? Mr Walker had been gagged as a result of a settlement agreement after he dared to point out that targets could not be met in a "dangerously over-full" hospital. I wouldn't bet on any of the above. Instead of clearing his desk, Sir David is to retire with a pension pot of almost £1.9 million. To be fair, he has revealed a rottenness in NHS management culture and saved the state a lot of money. All those prematurely dead people can't collect pensions, can they? We can only hope that, at some point, the tubby, choleric Sir David finds himself enjoying the conditions that a blind, bullying management style failed to relieve at Mid Stafford. Please don't bother blowing the whistle, Sir David, if you find yourself with no one to help you to the loo. Management don't listen to pesky patients who get in the way of targets.