Flight of folly

I'm endlessly amazed at the dotty projects local councils get up to, quite often ignoring widespread advice that the project is dotty and should be scrapped.

Westminster Council in London thought it would be a super wheeze to build an artificial 25 metre (82 feet) hill next to Marble Arch. For £4.50 you could climb up to the top and see supposedly splendid views across the city.

Unfortunately the hill (the Marble Arch Mound) has been panned and ridiculed by just about everyone, including most of the visitors, local residents and 23 local amenity groups. Not only are the views far from splendid, they include rubble, building works and scaffolding. And unfortunately the hill (hillock would be more accurate) cost a staggering £6 million.

The £4.50 charge has been temporarily dropped and hundreds of people have flocked to the hill just to see how bad it is.

I'd like to think Belfast Council wouldn't dream up anything so monumentally daft, but you never know.

I wonder how long it will be before the Mound is discreetly removed at dead of night (or dead of several nights) and the council pretends it was never there in the first place. "Mound? What Mound? Where did you get that idea?"

Pic: the infamous Mound

Spilling the beans

In this era of supposed personal frankness, when people gush out their intimate thoughts and feelings to any passing journalist or TV presenter, you might think that no one has anything left to hide any more, that it’s all out there for instant public consumption.

I think not. For every person who spills the beans, there are ten others who’re more reticent and still keep an awful lot to themselves. Most of us don’t trust other people to be sympathetic to our innermost secrets, be they embarrassing, weird, disgusting or just incomprehensible.

The fact is that there are plenty of people only too willing to exploit other people’s weaknesses and eccentricities for their own personal gain or entertainment, and those uninhibited souls who lay their entire life on the table for others to pick at should either have a very thick skin or be prepared for a rather painful public mauling.

Even routine oddities like fear of flying, or fear of public speaking, or a passion for pickled onions, are often concealed in case of scorn or ridicule. As for the more rarified traits like social phobia or aversion to sex or hating to be watched, very few people would be trusted with those. Maybe only our partners, who’re going to find out sooner or later anyway.

It may be that other people are more sympathetic to those things than we imagine, but we daren’t risk telling the wrong person and being treated as some kind of freak show.

It may be that our shameful secrets are not as shameful as we think. But the longer we hide something, the more we prevent others from accepting and neutralising it, the more peculiar and monstrous it becomes, until the very idea of exposing it to others is unthinkable. We convince ourselves we’re so warped that if we confess all nobody will ever speak to us again.

We probably all need a personal therapist, someone we can confide in without fear of a negative reaction, someone who’ll listen without judging, someone who’ll help us to understand what we are rather than expecting us to be normal. With the best will in the world, even the closest and most trusted friend isn’t necessarily that dispassionate and all-embracing.

What's in a name?

Changing your name is increasingly popular. This year more than 90,000 Britons have used deed poll services to do just that, a rise of over 30 per cent on 2009.

People are keener to alter a name they dislike and avoid the related embarrassment, prejudice or ridicule. They're not going to put up with a cringe-inducing name just because their parents gave it to them or because changing it is too laborious.

They make the change for all sorts of reasons, not just because their name is Sidebottom or Smellie. Divorcees want their old name back. Job applicants with foreign names want something more indigenous. People want a name that's more suited to their personality, or is easier to spell and pronounce, or disconnects them from past crimes or shameful activities.

You can't change your name to just anything though. Deed poll services reject unsuitable names like Osama bin Laden or Jesus Christ or swear words. Or presumably overtly sexual words.

Apparently it's common for people committing suicide to change their names beforehand, a sign of the identity crisis they're going through. People may take on the name of someone they admire or someone they're obsessed with, like stalkers taking their victim's name.

I've never had any desire to change my surname, it's a very ordinary and unremarkable name. It doesn't reflect my personality at all, but what name would? It's not a liability in any way, be it employment, social occasions or anything else. So I'll hang on to it, thanks.

But I do wonder why Bob Geldof's daughters - Peaches Honeyblossom, Fifi Trixibelle and Pixie - don't change their names. I suppose if nothing else, they're memorable and distinctive. But don't they cringe every time they hear them?

Pic: Peaches Honeyblossom Geldof