What's in a name?

A couple of people have asked me recently, “Why marramgrass?” Over the life of this site that puts me up to the point where I guess I can answer the question.

It’s not very exciting.

The choice of name was down to a combination of factors:

• A word that had stuck in my head since GCSE Geography
• A fairly unusual and reasonably memorable word.
• A word I'd always fancied employing as the name of a band. I'm not in a band.
• The domain name was available (the surprise!).

Now the tag line (“unexpected, and a little spiky”) I find more interesting.

Marram Grass is the stuff that holds sand dunes together at the seaside. When you’re walking through it, it has this uncanny ability to poke through even the heaviest denim jeans and stab you in the calf. This usually makes me jump a little. I pretentiously likened this nature to that of my writing here — or at least what I hoped it would turn out like.

That’s a story I’ve been thinking about telling for four and a half years. Go figure.