Nicky Haslam’s diary: Marie-Anna Berta Felicie Johanna Ghislaine Theodora Huberta Georgina Helene Genoveva and other big names

I was once bundled into a police car in Palm Springs to explain why I didn’t have snow-tyres on my pick-up in the red-hot California desert. I don’t remember the outcome of the ‘arraignment’, but will never forget the lady cop’s name, L. Nevada Yonkers. Other weird names have stuck with me. Reading The Most of Nora Ephron, whom I met once and immediately fell in love with, I realised that when I was working on Vogue in New York in the 1960s, she had been on the staff of Newsweek. I used to be obsessed by the weird names of the girls on Newsweek’s masthead. I would reel them off like a litany. I can still recall Virginia Bittikofer, Minnie Magazine, Olga Giddy and, best of all, Fortunata Snyder Trapnell, who I stalked vicariously though several marriages and divorces. Of course, the lately deceased Duchess of Alba’s string of names took the biscuit, but with the grim news that Doris and Edna are suddenly fashionable, I rather long for a return to, say, Marie-Anna Berta Felicie Johanna Ghislaine Theodora Huberta Georgina Helene Genoveva, the given names of my friend Countess Esterhazy, who is known, understandably, as Bunny.