Have you ever been involved one of those endless disputes on the internet that you just can’t seem to escape? It’s like one of those schoolyard fights where the first person to walk away and say they’ve had enough is labelled a coward and loser by the other, even if the reason why you want to walk away is because the other person is talking gibberish, and because it is three in the f**king morning and you just need to sleep. It’s okay to sleep sometimes.

I have not yet reached that point in my exchanges with Martyn Bradbury, but I fear things are escalating. To recap, he wrote a post about me, I wrote a post mocking him, we had an exchange on Twitter, and now he has written another post about me. My immediate reaction is to want to taunt him further, particularly with regard to his claim that Cameron Slater is my new best friend (a claim that anyone who actually reads my work will find as entertaining as I do), but I suspect that lefties labelling each other as friends of Slater may be something similar to the phenomenon known as Godwin’s Law.

Ironically, I was engaged in drafting a legal settlement agreement when this all erupted, so it got me thinking. Surely we can settle this dispute and save ourselves all a lot of bother and boredom. It seems a more attractive proposition than our continuing this stoush, which would inevitably involve either a point by point rebuttal of Bradbury’s dubious claims, or another post poking fun at him, which would in turn draw forth more incoherent rage from Bradbury.

I also seem to have stumbled into some kind of anti-The Standard thing, and Bradbury seems to be particularly put out that some of my posts occasionally appear on that site. I suspect one could devote quite a lot of time forming a theory on why Bradbury is quite so fixated on The Standard, but it’s a fight I don’t want to get involved in. The Standard folk asked me if they could occasionally syndicate my posts and I said sure, fine. I never asked them to do anything for me.

But all this is beside the point. I don’t appear to have the rage Bradbury does (which again, I won’t speculate about), which is why I am offering the hand of peace.

So Martyn, if you will sign and return to me the below settlement deed, I’m sure we will both put this behind us.

Bradbury v Yorke