I've been hit by a lot of comment spam recently. A *lot* of it.

At first, I diligently deleted it; but massive quantities over a period when I was on holiday got through.

Then I changed my mind; the reason this spam is here is that it improves someones' Google ranking, I thought. If this is the case, leaving the spam around devalues Google - and makes comment spam their problem, I thought. They'll change the way they rank pages so that comment spam is no longer worth doing, and it'll go away, I thought.

Well, that hasn't happened. Maybe it will happen one day, but it hasn't yet. And the stuff is flooding in, and is increasingly offensive - to the point where I'm feeling that leaving it up here is Really Rather Wrong.

There isn't a quick solution to this that I'm aware of, and right now time is tight. I plan to move to a new installation of MovableType, bringing together the several weblogs that are hosted on our server (and a new one that is being built right now), and will more at ways of rejecting spam then, but that will take a few weeks.

So, comments are disabled (in a pretty crude fashion). Which is a real shame because one of the things *I* get from this weblog is feedback from a group of smart folks that come here. If you want to comment on any post (positively or negatively) whilst comments are disabled, please email me and I'll add your text to the foot of the relevant post.

Hopefully normal service will be resumed soon...

Back from Glastonbury. It was ace. As usual I'm spending a few days staring out of the window wishing I was in a field. I'm particularly happy that, as planned, I had a more active year than usual - I got out to wander around the site a lot more, seeing more of the cabaret/theatre/green field stuff and spending less time getting pissed.

Hooked up with Nige on the train down on Thursday and we arrived at 9ish, just in time to sit down and watch the football as the sun went down. Tramp tramp tramp across the site and up to the field where Tim and the Hitchin Massive had set up camp - after a brief search we wedged our tents in two almost tent-sized gaps, said our hellos, and popped off for a walk. Met up with Rach and Steve around the site and had a bit of a walkabout - notably down to the Lost Vagueness, an area I'd completely missed in previous years which was kinda special, with a ballroom, casino, and even wedding chapel.

The next day we contacted Dan and Mark (two friends of Nige's from work) and collected the crates of beer and cider which they'd kindly driven down from Brighton with. Sat around for a while at the Pyramid stage drinking with them, Mr Salmon and chums, then walked to the Glade and met up with Rach's cousin Tiffany and her husband Chris.

From there the weekend blurs... I remember seeing the Black Eyed Peas (not sure why, but I thought they were quite good), Goldfrapp, Chemical Brothers, some impressive acrobats in the Cabaret Tent (as well as "Pierre and his Hip Hop Hats"), Basement Jaxx, The Divine Comedy ("Have you taken some nice.... food?"), Orbital, and the Goldie Looking Chain. The latter were particularly good, and surprisingly together musically. I particularly enjoyed the tradition of covering "Seven Nation Army" that half the bands I saw seemed to sign up for...

...and all of a sudden, it was over, and we were sitting in the back of Mark's camper van getting driven back to Brighton. Boo, hiss. I spent Monday and Tuesday mostly sleeping and still feel exhausted now. Looking forward to next year tho' ;)

And how did we ever manage at these events without mobiles?