"But," said my father, torn away from an important conference call, "we're not Scottish."A heated debate followed, which was fortunately won by my father, but it wasn't really a victory.
For I was still lumbered with the name Alice (just a more conventional spelling) - and a lifelong burden of hardship and teasing.
If bookmakers are a reliable indicator, it is a fate also set to befall the royal baby due at the end of the month.
There have been, according to Rupert Adams, a William Hill spokesman, "a significant number of bets" that the new addition to the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge's family will be a girl called Alice.
Indeed, punters have staked so much money that the odds have fallen from 14-1 to 4-1. "Alice," Adams confirmed, "is the new favourite."
Well, William and Kate, it may be the nation's favourite. It may derive from the Germanic Adalhaidis and mean "of nobility". It may indeed be the name of Lewis Carroll's much-loved heroine. But, as someone burdened with the name, I beg of you, don't call the kid Alice!
Or A-lice. Yes, that was the first nickname bandied around the playground at primary school. "A-lice. A-lice. You're a creepy crawlie, A-lice," my contemporaries would gleefully shout. I tried to point out that this was grammatically incorrect, and that it would be "A-louse", but five-year-olds don't really care about such pedantry.
To make matters worse, it had taken me a while to master saying my own name. It's not a long one, no. But I had a lisp. To say "Alice" is rather difficult when your tongue is too big for mouth.
With the initials AA, I was first on the register, too, and mild panic would set in at every roll call because at my school - The Barn - we had to repeat our names.
Even now, when under pressure, I slip back into my lispy days. The amount of times I've been presented with an "A-L-E-S" cup in Starbucks, is painful proof.
Things deteriorated when I was six and we moved house. It was there that my younger sister met her best friend, who was called, you guessed it, "Alice".
She was angelic, blonde and beautiful, while I had a dark-haired tomboy aesthetic going on, but still both sets of parents had to adapt our names to differentiate. So she became "Little Alice". You'd have thought that would have been enough. "Little Alice" and "Alice".
Oh no, not with two elder siblings. No, I became "Big Fat Alice."For seven years, it was "Big Fat Alice, it's time for tea", "Big Fat Alice, Mummy wants you", "Big Fat Alice, Daddy says have you done your homework".
At 13, I'd had enough and embraced boarding school. Here at least I could reinvent myself and leave the nickname behind me. I was successful, to a degree.
Yes, I lost the "BFA", but in its place came a new, arguably, worse nickname.
Fourteen girls, all on the verge of puberty and sharing dormitories, so of course our night-time gossip was boys, boys and more boys - and occasionally the male form, specifically willies.
Or, as we discovered in the dictionary, phalluses.Do you know the funny thing about the word phallus? Yes, that's right - it rhymes with Alice. So throughout my five years at boarding school, I was known as "Alice the Phallus".
I'm not the only Alice who has suffered at the hands of their name, either. Journalist Alice Smellie recalls similar strife: "In my teens, I certainly felt that Alice wasn't a cool name.
My father taught at my school, and when I was 11 a few of the girls in my form teased me relentlessly for being uncool, shy and, inexplicably, posh.
Part of the problem was my 'posh' name."One of them used to lean over my desk, fag breath in my face, and say in faux RP: 'Ai'm Alice, and Ai'm going to Buckingham Palace to see the Queen'."
Smellie says she dreamed about changing her name to Alicia.
Ex-BBC Radio 4 newsreader Alice Arnold remembers having to constantly correct people who called her 'Allison'.
"I was the only Alice I knew until I got to university," says Arnold. It can be a lonely place in the Alice camp.
But if anything should really dissuade Kate and William from settling on my dreadful name, it should be their daughter's actual namesake - and relative - Princess Alice.
Born in 1843, the third child of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert had a life dogged by difficulties.
She had an unhappy marriage, found her duties overwhelming and had, listen up Kate, a notoriously difficult relationship with her mother.
All in all, let's hope it's another boy.
