Thru a thread here, I managed to disable the comment bubble but now the number of comments looks as though it's part of the post title - same font and up really close. Spent ages trying all manner of changes to no avail - can someone please, in simple terms, tell me how to change this, i.e. further away and in a 'basic font'.

http://www.thursdays-child.com (bear with me, it needs more work and I'm new to this.

You'll also see I've messed up the centre column width and sidebar - again, much time spent trying to correct this - help?

for the comment if you want to seperate it a bit you could use

.comment-bubble {padding-left: 40px;}

in the css

why do you say you have messed up the widths?

Perfect, many thanks.
Central column text is pretty much 'hitting' text in the sidebar - could do with space between the two. I've obviously changed something but what, I really don't know. Template shows 8 and 4.

When you decide to muck with a theme, it is time to learn some CSS (try http://htmldog.com/guides/css/) and HTML and a tool like FireBug in Firefox. Using the Examine tool

you can see the CSS that is being applied and change it and see the results. One trick is to put a border around the elements you are dealing with to define their location.

I would see if you can put some left padding on the sidebar.

I did try adding padding but it seemed to make it worse. I've now realised there's 2 figures and now understand. Changing 1st figure 'moved' it to the left, change the 2nd figure and it 'moved' to the right. Obvious now.