I’m not saying that anyone who ever posts an internet comment is nuts. But…

Back when I was a diary columnist, they’d publish my email address in the paper every day. I did love the emails from lunatics. And we’re talking proper nuts here, not just xenophobes, or people with unusually strident views about Israel. My favourite was a guy from Glasgow, whose emails were all either impenetrable tracts about global macro-economics, or detailed, punctuation-free recreations of the arguments he’d had that week with his GP, fellow lunatics, or the local branch of the Hari Krishnas. I remember getting bored one afternoon and looking him up on Lexis Nexus. He’d twice been published on the letters page of the Daily Express.

I suppose they’ve probably gone off email, the lunatics. Just like the way they went off letters. I haven’t had a proper letter from a madman in years. There was this one guy who used to write to me every couple of months. Well, I say ‘write’, but there weren’t actually many words. He’d usually sellotape a photograph of my face on the envelope, instead of writing my name, which was a nice touch. Inside, he’d take an article I’d written, glue it onto the middle of a big white piece of paper, and extrapolate from it with swooping felt-tip diagrams and mathematical calculations. At the bottom, he’d always write ‘= 666!!’. I suppose he might have been published in the Daily Express, too.

So where have they gone, these lunatics, if they don’t send emails and don’t write letters either? Well, it’s obvious. They’re in the comments. And nobody even notices, because down there, madness is par for the course.

I don’t mean to be abusive here. I’m certainly not suggesting that everybody who comments on an article, ever, is sitting at home in their pants, tinfoil on head, basically being batshit doolally. I’m just saying it worries me.