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.