IT looks as if we're going to have to get used to calling it Durham-Tees Valley and not Teesside airport.

It is said to be still under discussion but I've sat, as a neutral observer with a shorthand notebook, through enough of such "discussions" to know a foregone conclusion when I see one.

Most major airports have shortish names - Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted, Luton, for example - easy to remember and actually telling you less about the immediate area they serve than "Teesside" does. Still, I suppose it's better than the bizarre suggestion that it become New York (halfway between Newcastle and York was the rationale for that, it seems). Big Apple-type-New York's airports, in the way of such things, aren't called New York, of course. Not that names seemed any help at all to baggage handlers at Newcastle airport who, last week, routed an urgently-needed donated kidney to Paris instead of Belfast.

Teesside, however, is seeking to re-brand itself.

So that's the name of the game. Re-branding. And a very trendy one it is, too, though most players go for something shorter in the search for the here and now.

Abbey National wants us to call it plain Abbey and to forget that rather dated couple striding out under the pitched roof umbrella. British Steel became Corus and the hastily-dumped Consignia is best forgotten. Then there's the capital letter, rapidly going the way of the apostrophe Lloyds and Barclays and Crufts dog show dumped years ago. Take the airline which launched flights to Dublin from Teesside on Sunday - bmibaby - and work out how to fool your computer's word processing program into starting a sentence with a small b.

Local chartered surveyors, Storey Sons and Parker, now call themselves storeys:ssp which looks like a stray bit of a web site except that, confusingly, their web address includes it as storeys-ssp. Northern Electric and Gas is now npower.

Change (to say nothing of linguistic decay) in all around we see. I blame Mars. Not the influence of the closest-for-60,000-years planet blazing in the night sky this autumn, but the confectionery giant which renamed one of my favourite bars, Marathon, as the nasty-sounding Snickers. That was ten years ago and I haven't bought one since. Hang it all, a woman has to have some standards.

Then Opal Fruits became Starburst, Oil of Ulay became Olay. Jif became Cif. That last caused a friend of mine to change brands because she thought Jif had gone off the market.

I understood the Jif-to-Cif change was because we could confuse it with lemon juice, but we'd coped with both for years and anyone unable to tell the difference between sink cleaner and lemon juice isn't safe to let out with a shopping list.

There is a story that it was changed for Slovenians, who couldn't pronounce Jif. Unilever should hover round the supermarket shelves to hear Sif, Seef, Kif, Chif and "that stuff that used to be Jif". And I still mutter: "Finisterre" when the shipping forecaster refers to "Fitzroy".

Here ends this week's episode of Grumpy Old Women.