Is there anybody out there?

A warm welcome back to Judeosphere and Olly's Onions - just as I was about to delete the latter from my blogroll, after four long months of silence. Olly, you've been missed. And I've just (re-) added Jeff Weintraub, culled mercilessly from the list after he went a bit quiet some months back. Also, for a long time I've been wondering whatever happened to the Labour Humanist blog - but I've just discovered, very belatedly, that there's now a fully-fledged website: well worth a visit.

The disappearance of a blog, especially an anonymous or pseudonymous one, is rather like that final, unbelievably poignant scene in Philip Pullman's 'Dark Materials' trilogy. The portal between the two parallel worlds has to be sealed, never to be re-opened, and Will and Lyra realise that there is absolutely no way they can ever contact each other again. Or it's like the scene in 2001 when the spaceship spins over into a distant galaxy, with no chance of communication with Earth being resumed.

Or am I being a little melodramatic here?