This business is not a new one. This website has been a long time in the gestation, but with a bit of help from my friends, it has finally reached fruition. So what’s the first question people always ask about my business?
Why did you call your business Iris42?
I had my first writing published under the pseudonym of Iris42 when I was a member of ABC radio’s Argonauts Club in the 1960s (I was very, very young):
In Greek mythology, Iris was a traveller and messenger, goddess of the rainbow. Farmers revered her for her role in recycling water by lifting it from lakes and rivers up into the skies whence it would fall as rain over their crops:
The iris is an elegant, eye-catching flower with varieties ranging from the ladylike Iris ‘Alba’ to the gutsy wetlands worker, Iris pseudacorus:
In contemporary times, the number 42 is known to readers of Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy as the answer to the ultimate question, though no-one knows exactly what the ultimate question is:
Latitude 42 degrees runs through the middle of Tasmania, the beautiful southernmost state of Australia in which I reside.
42 is a good age (21 years old second time around). When I get there (!), I think I’ll stick with it for a while.
To sum up: Iris for the natural world, 42 for the number-crunching business world, laced together into an accurate description of the person I am and the business that I run.