We will be back — in 2004

Well, it's been a right palaver, but we are now making progress towards an all-singing, all-dancing CMS which will allow the phoenix-like rebirth of The Rockall Times.

Accordingly, we are now in a position to say with certainty that we will be back up and running on Monday 2 February, if not sooner.

That allows us plenty of time for debugging, testing and, of course, plenty of mulled wine and cracker pulling in between.

In the meantime, you can help support this Herculean coding task by buying one of our magnificent t-shirts, including the cheeky new "Smoking leads to heroin addiction, paedophilia and suicide bombing" government health warning, as advertised on the front page of this issue. All proceeds from sales will be ploughed into keeping our code monkeys fuelled with pizza and black coffee, so the more we sell, the quicker we can be back up and running.

So, it just remains to apologise for the ongoing satire void caused by our temporary shutdown, but please just bear with us a little longer...