Coming out as a Colin

It looks as if Salut! is about to breeze past another milestone. Having clocked up 1,000 profile views by yesterday, it seems certain that the number of visits will reach five figures some time today.

The truth is that we have already passed the 10,000 mark. Salut! had been in operation and attracting lots of readers for two-and-a-half weeks before I installed the counter.

Thanks for your interest or support, or both, and thanks also for the lively and - for the most part - acceptable debate and banter.

I felt sneaking sympathy for Colin Berry's daughter and the loyalty she quite properly showed towards her father.

It does seem to me that, within reason and the usual bounds of decency and the law, this site should be open to pretty much anyone.

Perhaps there are decent and lawful contributions still to come that I will feel, for one reason or another, ought to be discouraged.

Mere disagreement with someone (as often occurs with Bill Taylor, close friend though he is, as well as with strangers, Colin Berry included) would not be such a reason.

But Corinne's deception, leading a poor chap on to think she cared enough about the footballing fortunes of Sunderland to look up the score from a lowly Saturday match, does present a tough test of my Voltaire-like advocacy of free speech.

Suspicions have been raised by others. And the fact that Corinne's, complete with apostrophe s, rhymes passably with the way most French people pronounce my Christian name, and therefore Colin Berry's too, may be too much of a coincidence.

It is just possible that CB dislikes his first name. I will never be able to forget the day, a birthday come to that, when my name appeared prominently on one arts page feature, about Linda Thompson, only to be juxtaposed with another in which the actor Colin Firth lamented that he'd been lumbered with "the sort of name you give your goldfish".

But the evidence is still thin, whatever trouble people appear to have staying away each time they say they will. Why, even Natalie returned briefly, all smiles and forgiveness, despite my disapproval of Texan penal policies and the efforts of Richard of Orléans to impose a Frenchified H on her prénom.

It is for my namesake to declare himself if he chooses.

Anonymity and pseudonyms have their uses, and I would not wish to insist on everyone posting a proper identification.

If Corinne is Colin (B), however, then he is as guilty of stretching an amusing ruse a little too far as one or two others may have been of turning him into a punchbag.