They say you should never read the comments, but they also said the internet would make us cleverer and now we all know someone who believes Queen Elizabeth is a lizard, so I suppose we should just read the comments and be damned.

To be fair, damnation isn’t the only thing that’s been wished on me in the comments under my columns. Sometimes the heckling is simply bizarre, like the person who pops up every so often to tell me that they hate my columns and refuse to read them, rather like a swivel-eyed eccentric who storms into a deli every few weeks to yell at the proprietor that he will never, ever buy a salami, no matter what anyone says, before storming out again...