Thanks for your thoughts. You can view a work-in-progress of my new theme work at
http://dhaigh.dyndns.org. (I was reluctant to post this because it is very much a work in progress).
Ignoring the little issues with the heading widths that I'm working on, you can see the darker gray areas used around the (white) central story list area. I was looking to add a blending/bevelling around the four edges of the central white space. Easy to do you say.
However, while it looks good here, when you access any sort of say admin page like "Stories", or the Links page or whatever, GL draws the content of the page using the block-templates. These end up being drawn immediately inside my bevelled edging - and unsurprisingly looks silly. There-in lies the problem.
What I really need it to be able to do is to determine that it's in story-list mode and should thus draw the bevelled edging. Otherwise just carry on as usual.
But unfortunately the template structure doesn't support this type of behaviour. There's nothing between leftblocks.thtml and rightblocks.thtml. It seems the stories are drawn directly by code and they in turn call the storybodytext.httml templates etc etc. I guess I'm needing something in between that gets called when a list of stories is about to be rendered.
Hope this makes things clearer!!?