East Rhidorroch Lodge is about eight miles from the small fishing town of Ullapool, in Wester Ross on Scotland’s north-west coast. If you take a small detour about five miles along the unmade private road that leads to the Lodge, you’ll discover Rhidorroch House, a rather grand Victorian pile, and like us be disappointed to be told politely by the owners that this is not where you are staying. Let’s just say that (a) the Lodge is basic and (b) those with a predilection for stuffed polecats in glass cases and moth-eaten stag heads on the walls will feel quite at home.

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Photographer: FLORA HANITIJO

The convertible thing is relatively new to me. It’s a badge of honour in the car enthusiast world to look down on soft-tops. After all, with convertibles structural rigidity, light weight and handling finesse are sacrificed at the altar of seeing and being seen. Which perhaps more than anything speaks to the limited relevance of any of these dynamic qualities in the real world.

I think it helped that the first convertible I ever drove (perhaps five years ago) was an ancient VW cabrio belonging to my then girlfriend. It was red with a white vinyl roof, an erratic electrical system and an unshakeable smell of something like mildew mixed with a dead body. And it was hugely fun to drive. Things that in a car with a fixed roof would have been massively irritating (a radio that would play only one station, for example) simply added still more character. Somehow convertibles are able to transcend the limitations of the normal cars from which they are created, I think because each trip with the top down, no matter how mundane, is elevated by wind in the hair and a general sense of being more connected to the world outside.

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If there’s any word guaranteed to incite rage and insecurity, surely ‘art’ is the safest bet. It’s not just a matter of what constitutes art and what does not (although that in itself is often enough to start fights in the street), but also whether a formal definition of art should exist at all, whether it’s unfair and discriminatory. If class warfare is all that ensues we feel as though we got off lightly.

I’ve been accused of elitism before and I’m quite sure it will happen again, so I’ve got nothing to lose by planting myself firmly in the camp of those who think that art really does matter, and that there are and will always be criteria for what counts as art. Let me get something straight, I’m not one of those people who’ll tell you I could have painted that myself, or that it’s not art if it’s not an oil painting of a stag standing proudly in the Scottish Highlands. But your angst-ridden monologue recorded on your webcam and uploaded to YouTube? No, sorry, that really isn’t art and you are not an artist.

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It really isn’t that we didn’t want to embrace the digital world until now (doesn’t the word “digital” feel horribly outdated?). Instead the reason we’re just getting around to launching a real website for Orange Life, our print magazine that launched in 2004, is that we wanted to do something quite different from the traditional approach to online magazine content.

We’re beginning with something simple. As you’ll see the structure of our site is that of a blog. You’ll find daily content updates (sometimes multiple times a day) and our intention is less to be editors than it is to give our writers a context in which to write freely.

We’ve organized the editorial into five categories:

Art, Design, Architecture

Books, Music, Film

Fashion, Beauty, Style

Orange Life Things

Travel, Culture, Society

The labels are self-explanatory, but we encourage you to explore within each category.  Virtually all articles are open to comments, and intelligent discussion and feedback is most welcome.

To be perfectly honest, we’re not sure yet who our audience will be, but we suspect it will be close to that of the printed version of Orange Life; that is, people who are interested in ideas for their own sake, and find style and substance to be perfectly compatible.

That’s all for now. Call it the start of the beginning if you like.

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Living In London by Emma Hardy