It occurred to me one Tuesday afternoon, as I sat squinting at my monitor through vari-focals that seemed increasingly inadequate to the task, that I might have reached that peculiar stage in life where you should gracefully retreat from certain endeavours. Coding, it transpires, appears to be one of them.

I had spent the better part of three days attempting to customise a blog theme – a task that the internet had assured me was “beginner-friendly” and “intuitive,” two words that I’ve found are often deployed by people who find quantum physics a bit obvious. The young fellow on YouTube who demonstrated the process completed it in just under seven minutes, chatting amiably throughout as his fingers flew across the keyboard like a concert pianist with somewhere urgent to be.

My own attempt more closely resembled a game of Whac-A-Mole played with oven mitts. No sooner had I corrected one catastrophic error than another would appear, often more bewildering than the last. CSS, that mysterious language which apparently controls how things look on screen, became my particular nemesis. Every instruction I gave it was interpreted with the kind of wilful misunderstanding normally reserved for teenagers being asked to tidy their rooms.

“Make pagination work,” I would command through gritted teeth, only to find that the entire website had turned into a mangled version of itself, and for reasons I cannot begin to fathom, all text was now upside down (I might be joking about that part).

At one point, I managed to create something that the error message described as “an infinite loop,” which I gather is the coding equivalent of dividing by zero. The cooling fan on my laptop began to sound like a small aircraft preparing for take-off.

It was around hour fourteen, when I found myself googling “why won’t stupid blog work” and seriously considering whether I could pass off a plain white page with black text as “brutalist web design,” that I had my epiphany. There are people – younger, brighter people with reflexes not yet dulled by decades of coffee consumption – who can do this sort of thing properly. More importantly, they can do it without developing a facial tic or threatening to throw their computer out of the nearest window.

There’s a certain dignity, I think, in recognising when you should leave a particular field to others. Just as I wouldn’t attempt to compete in an Olympic sprint (or indeed, any activity requiring movement faster than a determined amble), perhaps I should accept that modern web development belongs to those whose brains are still sufficiently plastic to absorb new information without smoking slightly.

I closed my laptop, made a cup of coffee, and thought for a while. Then, I had an “old-man nap” and realised what I could do. I could try one more thing before asking for help. I could build the simplest theme possible and go with that. It’s what you are looking at. I’m quite pleased with it, really. it’s responsive and all that dark art stuff.

But here’s the thing. When it comes to coding, I’m still able to mentor younger developers in the way of the web development world. Having spent an inordinate amount of time explaining to clients that it’s not like adding content to a Word document, you have to actually code this stuff, I have experience I can share.

So the theme for this blog is all my own work. With some assistance from AI on the bits I got stuck on. I could have asked one of my younger developers to help. Who would have finished it before I’d re-boiled the kettle and made a fresh brew. But I take some satisfaction from having (finally) managed it myself.

But for older developers and dinosaurs like me? The wisest course of action is simply to acknowledge when you’re outclassed, preferably before you’ve reduced yourself to shouting at inanimate objects. And hire the bright young stars to write the code. Then be there to guide them along the path to web development supremacy.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to remember how to get this post live…