A mate emailed me a question that had just occurred to him.

The question was: "do you see any significance in the fact that comments posted during the working day tend to be Lil'Elf style, while those posted in the evening or at weekends are more balanced and reasonable?"

You know, this is actually a very deep question, because it provokes the thought that pro-Labour members of the commentariat strut their stuff while they're at work, which more than likely means they're nicking their employers' time and band-width to be doing that. On t'other hand, the non-Elfin commenters do it on their own time, using their own resources.

I wonder if this is an accurate notion. Perhaps the renowned socio-economist, Edward Scicluna might like to make a snap-judgement on the question, like he did after the power-cut on Good Friday night, when like Superman, he bounded to the conclusion that the whole thing had cost us so many millions.

Or maybe he'd like to dedicate some deeper thought to the question, working out at the same time how much time is wasted by the Elves and what it costs. Of course, this aspect of the debate is very much more difficult to divine, because I really couldn't begin to tell how long it takes your average Elf to string together the pearls of wisdom he casts before us swine.

Nor could I, for that matter, tell how long it takes yon Elf to work his way through my thought-provoking words, for all that every single one of them seems not to read my stuff before commenting about it. Frankly, I'm inclined to believe the ones who say they haven't read me, because their comments very often bear small connection to anything I've written, but that's by the by.

Let's hazard a guess, then, that it takes your common or garden Elf a good half hour to run his finger along the screen to read this, with breaks to consult a dictionary. Then factor in another half hour for a fag break to help him marshal his reactions, and another half hour to tap out the comment, letter by letter.

You'll notice, I trust, that I didn't make any assumption for time taken to check grammar and syntax, because quite clearly, no such checking is ever carried out.

So there you have it, each comment posted by a Lil'Elf has taken a good ninety minutes to cook up, so if you multiply that by however many comments there are below stories in the electro-Times, you'll get an idea how much time said Elves are nicking from their employer in order to stick up from the jolly old Labour Party.

Extrapolating further, as sociologists do, you can come to the conclusion, law-abiding tax-payer that you are, that since most Lil'Elves probably work for the Government, the reality of life being what it is, it's you and I who are paying for all this.

Great stuff, I'm actually paying people to lurk on the ‘Net making scurrilous remarks about my writing.

I don't know if, like me, you got caught up in the UK elections and the saga that followed, but it was quite a bit of fun. They even managed to make Constitutional Law interesting, unlike our local version of the Labour Party, who seem to have taken it into their heads that the Constitution is there to prevent sensible governance rather than promote it.

I watched Gordon Brown delivering himself of a few words as he left No 10 to say tatty-bye to the Queen and I was moved by his dignified manner, as well as impressed by how the weight seemed to lift perceptibly from his shoulders as he spoke. Power and responsibility shifted from one side of the spectrum to the other and none of the political heavyweights involved did any whining about the power of incumbency or people selling votes for a couple of quid or anything ludicrous like that.

Which is not to say that the great unwashed, if the evidence of the radio talk-shows is anything to go by, are any more ill-informed or banal than us. One bloke, for instance, was bleating about how it was the immigrants' vote that prevented the Tories from making greater headway, ignoring the fact that - erm - immigrants don't actually have a vote.

Another of these political geniuses also came up with the idea that it was pity that the Tories weren't fully in power so that they could repeal the Human Rights Act.

There was I thinking that messing around with human rights was reserved to the KMBs of this world: verily we are but inhabitants of a village.