My boyfriend, the crazy fool, has just accidentally deleted our weblog. This wouldn’t matter so much if it wasn’t mostly being written by other people these days, but as it is, all those contributions have been cruelly wiped off the face of the interweb.

Is this grounds for divorce?

Mark writes:

Well, K.H., it certainly seems as though you’re in a pickle. Now, I don’t know much about the superhighinterwebnetway, so I have no idea whether you’ll be able to retrieve all the posts you’ve lovingly crafted since you and your man first moved into Uborka Towers. Perhaps there’s some cunning time machine you can use which will transport you back to your very first cucumbery day of Uborking.

But what of your contributors? Well I understand that Ewan may not be so miffed that his nefarious week of bondage, drugs and contract killing has been erased from public gaze. That sort of thing gives a young shark a bad reputation, you know. Also, Graybo’s potted plants may well prefer to stay out of the limelight (though that could be sunlight; I’m horticulturally-challenged, you see).

Caty’s reports for BBC Uborka 24 may well have been syndicated across to the ITV Uborka Channel or perhaps even Skyborka, so they may not be lost forever. And, as you may have guessed, Steph is working on getting an agony aunt column in a (dis)reputable tabloid newspaper and is merely printing her ‘scoops’ here first as a courtesy. So, perhaps your contributors may not be as heartbroken as you think.

I’m not sure that divorce is the appropriate course of action to take here, however saddening it is to see the loss of all those cocktail hours, book lists and wonderful holiday photos. An instinctive first reaction would be a swift, sharp slap to the back of your boyfriend’s head, possibly followed by the threatened withdrawal of dinner. When the dust has settled after the mélee which will inevitably ensue after such a terrifying threat, you should consider instructing lawyers. If, on the other hand, becoming a lecturer at a law school seems a rather random and unnecessary step (and not at all helpful in this situation), you could simply sigh and reflect that this, like much of life, is simply inevitable.

Perhaps it is God’s way of telling you that you should restart Uborka afresh, with all the pomp and ceremony of launching a new ship. Perhaps it is like the cryptic message in a fortune cookie: “13th day unlucky for gherkin-themed online writing area”, giving you the chance to consider the whys, hows, whos, whoses, whens, whenses, whences, wherefores and other question words of your weblog. Perhaps instead it is a form of spring cleaning, the Dyson vacuum cleaner of the delete key reaching under the sofa of Uborka to find the dust bunnies and loose change of text and sucking them all up into the hoover bag of that great big archive in the sky.

They say that every end is a beginning. It is written that the first shall be last, and the last shall be first. Every cloud has a silver lining. Clichés are the last refuge of a scoundrel. In other words, no idea here. Hit him if it helps (but don’t tell him I told you to).