Thank you all so much for your patience over the last couple of weeks; as many of you will be aware, at various points there have been obtrusive adverts appearing on the site, and in particular, over the main content.

This has been nothing to do with us, but sadly, and irritatingly, some external person managed to hack into the site and deploy this annoying code. As to what they were looking to achieve (over and above possibly the odd click of an advert) beats us. We're sure it has caused you just as much pain as it has us. At no point would any of your data, or your devices, have been compromised by this.

Many thanks to our fab friends at 3B Digital for their patient and skilful work on hopefully getting to the bottom of this very, very annoying issue.

We hope that everything stays looking as it should now, and again thank you for bearing with us recently. We will be closely monitoring things in case there's any future attempts to put the adverts back on...

UPDATE: the incredibly irritating people behind this attack on the site are persisting. We cannot understand what they are getting out of it, other than being extremely annoying to you, and us. As instances are identified, they are being dealt with and hopefully all traces will be eventually eradicated...