My oldest friend was talking about her next door neighbours from when she was growing up and what they are up to now. I knew them a bit as well. I remember their dog. “Yes,” said my friend, “the boys were obsessed with World War II and that’s why they called the dog Rommel.” Until that very moment I had believed Rommel to be a perfectly normal name for a dog. It’s not like I hadn’t heard of Rommel the Desert Fox but until then, these two things had lived in different corners of my brain. I would say, I knew Rommel the dog first.
Wait, was Rommel a giant black poodle type breed? Who maybe holidayed in Kerry in the late 1980s? If so I met him too! Or it was a more popular dog name than you’d think.
No, he was a golden retriever. How mysterious. Maybe it IS a popular dog’s name.
Our first landlord had a dog called Heinkel – a rather vicious wirehaired Jack Russell so perhaps apt.
These Germanic names seem more common than I would have thought.