Hello. Bored with the design of my site, I spent fifteen minutes today hunting around for a new template and chose this one for several reasons. First—and most complex—I quite like it. Second, it seems to suit the frivolous nature of the miscellaneous bits and pieces I occasionally publish here. Third, I was discussing with various colleagues today the idea of “the fold” in relation to designing for the web. The idea of the fold is of course highly relevant and important when designing for paper; one must or should or might at least consider getting one’s salient points set out on the part of a document where the reader looks first – above the fold. But the idea of the fold is irrelevant when I can if I want, and probably from time to time shall, publish—on Twitter and/or Facebook and/or in e-mails and/or on an advertisement on the side any one of the “social media” Clapham omnibuses and bandwagons that travel the interweb in large numbers these days—links to articles that would otherwise never make it above any fold, virtual or otherwise. So I thought I’d introduce not a fold but some long grass beneath which to conceal my questionable content. And I shall let my site’s visit statistics tell me whether the “fold” is relevant and real on the world wide web. My guess is that it will be shown not to be.

And fourth, and most importantly, I fancied a change and this design made me think that maybe one day, not necessarily this year, but maybe at least at some point this decade, the cheerless, unencouraging weather might improve, and become something approaching warm, sunny and cheering. Stranger things have surely happened. We shall see.