Comments temporarily lost in the ether

Apologies to all JLU members and readers who left comments over the past few weeks. They appear to have been caught in some sort of blogger ether. I wondered for a while why everyone had gone so quiet.

The JLU site has just been switched over to "beta" (whatever that means - is "beta" better than "alpha" or is alpha what I'm aspiring to?) - and the comments suddenly appeared out of nowhere.

Now that they have belatedly been published, I will go through them and, where applicable, offer a response. I can make such promises because, since I'm finishing up next week, I now have virtually no work. How luxurious!