When I set up this site I naively thought that some people with an interest in international affairs would stumble over it and that a few of them might like to submit fair-minded comments, so a bit of grown-up dialogue on different policy issues might take place for general edification.

One or two sensible and interesting comments have been registered, and my thanks to those who have sent in their views. But by far the largest number of ‘comments’ are dreary spam messages of some sort aimed at selling chemicals of different shapes and sizes.

Who are the people out there who invent these tedious programmes which scour the web for new entries on Blogs such as this and then automatically deface them?

A question to which there is no ready answer, it seems. I may have to end the misery for us all and delete the Comment facility, so that if anyone is minded to write to me they can send an email and Gmail can weed out all the rubbish.

Pity, but there it is.