In the highly unlikely event you want to comment here, I’m afraid you can’t. I have *either* been subject to an ongoing eighteen-month harassment campaign by one Mr Joe Simpson Walker, publisher of erotic fiction and Magic Band fan, *or* for some reason I am incredibly unpopular just among users of TalkTalk’s dynamic ADSL internet who live in the same area as Mr Walker, as Messrs F Turner, DJ Ward, Ian Thompson, and Pilbeam have all turned up in my comments to post abuse, all from the same tiny Lancashire town, all using the same ISP, and all using the same writing style. One of these “people”, who I am sure definitely exist outside Mr Walker’s imagination, tends to turn up a couple of weeks after another has been banned.

Only about 10% of the comments left from this area even get seen by me anyway — a set of keyword and IP address blocks already means about 90% go to the spam folder unseen, with the remainder left for moderation — but I’m frankly sick of blocking these comments, not because the rather unimaginative abuse (really, if these *are* separate people, then Ormskirk is really letting the rest of Lancashire down, as everyone else can come up with *much* better insults than “Fuck off and die, you whinging shit.”) bothers me in the slightest, but because it currently requires a whole three mouse clicks each time for me to ban one of these sock pupentirely real people who aren’t the imaginings of an obsessive grudge-holder, and that’s far more effort than I want to spend on this nonsense.

If you want to see what Mr Walker found so offensive, here’s the review with which he first took issue. Note that the band in question found it complimentary enough that they linked it from their press page.

Anyway, apologies to any Ormskirkians who are using TalkTalk and have something worthwhile to contribute to the discussion. I’ve checked and there has never yet been one, but I don’t discount the possibility of that happening in the future. If your witty, erudite, thought-provoking comment gets lost in the dustbin of history, you know who to blame.