I thought that I had a problem with my laptop when I switched it on this morning - I visited Google and found that instead of a white background and black text, it had been reversed.

It took a little while for me to notice the message “We’ve turned the lights out. Now it’s your turn - Earth Hour” and then the penny dropped!

Earth Hour is an initiative to get people to turn off their lights in their homes and businesses for one hour (8-9pm local time) tonight (29th March 2008), to highlight the need for energy conservation. It’s a simple action, won’t impact on your evening, but may just make you think about whether you really need all of those lights on.

One of my personal bugbears is shops who leave their shop window lights on at night - it’s so unnecessary, and when we were planning the THM Shop in Newport, the decision was made very early on that this is not something that we would be doing.

Unfortunately I was unable to access the Earth Hour website at the time of writing this blog, probably because everyone else who uses Google was trying to do the same thing. I’ll try again later…

So this evening, why not turn out your lights at 8pm?