I guess I owe it to my future readers to post a few lines on the title of this blog. Why MinorMass?
Here’s what I was thinking when I registered the domain some years ago:
Minor. A reference to the concision I hope to employ, especially when giving just a line or two of commentary on links to articles elsewhere. But also a bit of healthy self-deprication: I have no grand plan to take over the world with this blog, which I suspect will remain a “minor” place for me to explore ideas rather than broadcast those ideas to large numbers of people (something I’m lucky to be able to do via the Guardian).
Mass. “A unified body of no specific shape” – i.e. I hope that my posts will add up to something coherent, but I’m not sure exactly what that coherence will look like yet, or whether the posts will fall neatly into any existing subject category.
MinorMass. An irresistible if irrelevant reference to my lifelong personal hero (not that eighteenth-century music will feature heavily on the blog’s menu, though I reserve the right to dabble occasionally).
I originally thought the domain might be best suited to being a home for writing about things outside of my professional interests, but in the meantime I’ve realised that “MinorMass” has some nice environmental overtones, too. A little requiem mass for our ailing planet? A place of interest to the small but growing mass of people thinking about planet-wide environmental issues? A reference, even, to our tiny plant – a minor mass teaming with life in otherwise barren solar system?
In other words, it means whatever you want it to mean. It’s that poetic.