Colophon
Not an about page, because I have never much liked reading them. This is a colophon: how the thing is made and why it looks the way it does. If you want the who, it is at the bottom and it is short.
How the pages are made
Written in a text file, marked up by hand, uploaded. There is no publishing system, no comments, no newsletter and no tracking of any kind - I do not know how many people read this and have found that I prefer not knowing. Not knowing removes the temptation to write for the number.
One stylesheet, about a hundred and fifty lines, almost all of it setting type. The measure is deliberately narrow, around sixty-five characters, because a long line makes the eye work to find the start of the next one, and this is a site that has opinions about unnecessary work.
Why the dates are months
An essay is finished in a month, not on a day. Putting a day on it implies a publishing schedule I do not keep and invites the reader to work out how long the gaps are. Some gaps are three weeks and some are three months. They correspond to nothing but whether the thing was any good yet.
What is not here
No photographs. I tried, in the first year, and the photographs did something I disliked: they made the essays look like a lifestyle rather than an argument, and a photograph of a kettle in nice light is exactly the thing that essay is complaining about.
Nothing is sponsored and there are no affiliate links. If a specific product is named it is because naming it was the honest way to write the sentence.
Corrections
Two so far. The mending essay originally said twenty-one items and I had double-counted a pair of trousers. And the allotment essay called plot 9 plot 11, which Ray noticed within a week and mentioned twice.
Who
E.V.M. Middle of England, mid-forties, a job that has nothing to do with any of this. The initials are not mysterious, they are just enough. A name at the top of an essay invites you to read the person rather than the argument, and after twenty years of writing things with my name on them for work, I found I liked it better this way.