Bloody Vikings!

As regular readers (well, regular commenters, anyway) will have noticed, I have started being inundated with spam in the last few weeks.  Indeed, it seems to have been getting exponentially worse over the last few days.   I have therefore been forced to engage the 'Word Verification' widget on the comment form to try to cut this out.  My apologies for the inconvenience.  Please don't let those few extra seconds of squinting and bafflement deter you from leaving a comment.     I wonder why on earth this has suddenly started happening now, after three years of happy and (almost) entirely spam-free blogging?  It would be nice to think that this was some sort of accolade, an unwelcome but nevertheless flattering by-product of higher traffic or page-ranking or somesuch.  But I fear it is in fact just one of those random acts of unkindness that the Universe tosses our way on occasion.   "Well, there's spam, egg, sausage and spam.  That's not got much spam in it."