{Cheese and Beans}

I don’t quite know why I chose the mustard theme. It seemed like a good idea at the time. On reflection, it was pretty crap, wasn’t it. Awful in fact. I suspect a few kind words were said by those who quietly had their fingers down their throat.

You will no doubt notice the “Subminimal” theme that I hand wrote is back, while I search for something better.

I’m actually wondering what useful purpose the sidebar serves. I could probably remove the entire thing, and put the content into pages. That would allow the main articles to be bigger.

Of course 99% of this reasoning takes the blog closer to Depo Masthead – a theme I have liked for a long time.

On reflection, my hand made theme isn’t too bad at all – it just needs a bit of work on the sidebar to make it presentable… and maybe increase the leading and font size of the main articles…

For some unknown reason (and remember this is a professional software developer and web designer talking) the web server this installation of wordpress is sat on will no longer let me upload files.

What. The. Hell.

To be honest, I don’t have time to fiddle with it, and I’m not sure I can really be bothered to do so. Standby for the entire contents of this damn blog to move elsewhere… the RSS feed will remain the same, and the domain name will… the platform may well be ripped out from underneath itself though. I’m sick of this.

This is original – a hand written blog post.

Today marks both the end of something, and the beginning of something new.

Today marks the beginning of a real, proper blog. The beginning of an effort to regularly expound words of interest to the passing crowd from a platform built of the best virtual boxwood (in reality it’s built on Apache, PHP, MySQL and Wordpress, but that doesn’t have the same ring to it).

With a little luck, and a little effort, “Cheese and Beans” will become a regular literary performance charged with humility, honesty, wit, intelligence, eccentricity, annoyance, aggravation, hilarity, and perhaps an occasional spoon of levity.

I will screw my courage to the sticking place, and set about deconstructing the walls I have built over recent years; walls that conceal the real story. The interesting story. The story never told. The dark thoughts, the idiotic opinions, the damn fool escapades, and the inappropriate situations.

I’m not saying I’ll be leaving to fight in a foreign civil war, contract syphilis in Venice, or wooing statesmen’s wives (as a certain famous literary figure did a few hundred years ago), but I might at least have very pointed things to say about the school run, idiot car drivers, old people, religious zealots, and the remarkably interesting statistical relationship between the size of the hole in the o-zone layer, and the number of Pirates in the world.

I will encourage you, my audience, as you accompany me on this journey of discovery – we will come to know each other, you and I, to laugh, to commiserate, and to share confidences.

It’s going to be fun. It’s also going to be difficult, but mostly fun, on the whole, I think…

The next sentence is going to cause a number of people to slap their own foreheads with their hands – perhaps the entire readership – you know, all six of you. I’m just warning you in advance so you don’t try and blame me for personal injury.

I’m considering buying a domain name and webspace to build a “proper” blog.

If I’m going to live up to my word and put effort into the words I share, I may as well attempt to do so properly. This whole crackpot plan will of course mean moving everything again, and will probably cause a number of people who have half heartedly followed my various utterings to throw their arms in the air, and wander off to do something more interesting – you know, like cutting their toenails.

A little voice on one of my shoulders is shouting something about the platform not being important. Apparently it’s all about content – or rather words – and they better be damn interesting if an audience is going to be enticed towards them.

I have no problem writing – with a little application I know damn well I can compose far better words than I typically spew out.

If I do this, I’m going to have to lower my guard significantly. People are most interested in really weird shit – the deep, dark thoughts you wouldn’t normally share. The controversial opinions. The personality hatchet jobs you might normally keep to yourself. Without the honesty, the words lose their power, and the story becomes mundane.

I’m aware that since having children I’ve been busily building walls. Those will have to come down. If I do get the wrecking ball out, it will be scary as hell to start with, but might also be rather fun.

Oh crap. If I do this, I have to think of a name…

After much thought and deliberation – at least a twenty minutes during the cycle home from work – I have decided that it might be prudent to resurrect “cheeseandbeans.com”, which I already own. Truth be told, I can’t think up a better name than “Cheese and Beans”

“kingoftheidiots.com” is available, if you’re interested, as is “secondtotheleft.com”