Visits to Art Galleries and Museums are one of my life-long pleasures. I really loved my visit to Penlee House and I am sharing the Bloomberg Connects QR code to explore the Galleries for yourselves.

This blog is more trivial than an appreciation of a really great gallery.

The artist responsible for the rainy promenade picture is Norman Garstin, his daughter Alethea was also an artist.

It was this fact that jumped out at me.

Many years ago when I was first pregnant my mum had lent me one of her guilty secret novels. Guilty secret, because she didn’t always read great or worthy books. She often read books that she described as ‘ pulpy kidney novels’.

The heroine of this fiction book was a talented artist called Alathea Heron.

I have no idea if the author deliberately chose two Cornwall based artists to create the name. Alethea Garstin and Patrick Heron.

Unusually for one of my mum’s pulpy kidney books this one was very readable.

My hormones were madly in a state of flux and I immediately thought I would call my possible foetus Alethea and that she would become a great artist.  At the time I was an obstetric ultrasonographer in Brighton and I quickly realised my foetus was a boy and the name Alethea dropped out of thought and mind until this week.

By the time I was pregnant with a daughter I was living in Cornwall and despite being very aware of Cornish artists, when I chose her a Cornish name Alethea did not cross my mind.

Which led me to a very trivial ponder. Do people carry over their name choices for each pregnancy. Should I have kept the name Alethea close to my heart until I actually had a daughter or is it entirely normal to discard the unused name and choose afresh for each pregnancy.

I suspect my daughter is very grateful for my fickle mind, her actual name is much more suited to her character.

This whole trivial ponder has just cost me 75 pence with free postage! The book was published 40 years ago but Abebooks had several. I wonder if the heroine will impress me as much as she did 39 years ago, or was it just hormones?