If there's one thing which keeps me going through the dark nights and long winters of my life, it's the heartwarming knowledge that plenty of people out there want me dead. And most of them like to e-mail me.

This one sets a new record though. I received this anonymous e-mail via my website shortly after 11pm last night:

"You are a TWAT!!!!!!!!!!!
Eat shit and die!!!!!!
Nobody gives a shit about what u think u freakazoid!!!!!"

It's not the eighteen words (if you include 'u' and 'freakazoid') or twenty-two exclamation marks which are unusual. Let's face it, I'm no stranger to death threats, and most of the people who want to kill me have no grasp of grammar.

Over the past few years I've received a lot of quality feedback from parents, weather fans, regression therapists, music lovers and, of course, slappers. And that doesn't include all the people who just write to say "you suck". They're obviously mistaking me for James Dyson.

No, what sets this correspondent apart from my usual run-of-the-mill hate-mailers is the sheer speed with which I've managed to turn them against me. Having examined my website statistics, I can tell that this particular visitor arrived from Google after searching for 'paragallo meaning in italian'. That took them to the May 2005 archive of this blog, where I mentioned someone called Paragallo, and said that Lisa had made me Italian Beef Casserole.

TWO MINUTES LATER they clicked on 'E-mail Me' and composed the above.

At 11pm they'd never heard of me. By 11:02 they wanted me dead. That's not bad going, even for me.