Inbox update

As the rolling prairie, wild woods and rugged mountains of untamed cyberspace (which stretch out beneath the vast azure complexity of the blogosphere) give way to the safe patchwork fields of social networking sites, you may see a column of smoke rising from the sleepy Hamlet of my email address (far away from the bustling metropolises of Yahoo and Google). It's a quiet place, but recently enlivened by a new missive - a selection of 'books' which Amazon thinks I may want, based on my last purchases. Do I want Top Gear Top Drives? I do not. What about Robbie Coltrane's B road Britain? Or 3 Para, Time Bomb, Cherie Blair's Autobiography, a children's book by Geri Halliwell, or Provided You Don't Kiss Me: 20 Years with Brian Clough? I do not want these things. It's all particularly perplexing, since all I have ever bought off Amazon has been a few volumes of poetry and an old copy of The Golden Bough.

I recently misinterpreted an email. 'What do the spammers of Lagos mean by sending me an e-mail of ornithological subject matter' I wondered to myself. Ignoring the warnings, I opened the message. I turns out that I had greatly misapprehended the word 'swallows'.

This was not in my inbox-