Sound and fury, signifying nothing.

I got home from work on Friday, pottered about a bit then turned on the computer and pulled up Firefox.

My home page had changed.

Instead of the familiar red, black and white page which has greeted me every time I've gone online for over a decade, I was faced with multicoloured text and a message my brain couldn't process.

I read it again. And again. I looked for some handle on the joke. Then I realised there wasn't a handle because it wasn't a joke.

Then I swore. Lots.

No, I wasn't infected by a virus; my browser had not been hijacked.

The BASTARDS had closed us down.

The FUCKING BASTARDS had FUCKING closed us FUCKING down.

No FUCKING warning, nothing. Just FUCKING switched FUCKING off.

Guardian Talk, GUT, simultaneously the most interesting, stimulating, intellectual, trivial, infuriating and utterly insane website on the entire English-speaking web. No FUCKING more.

Our affair began in the same year I met my wife; millennium year. Internet access was a new thing at work and I was reading a story about the government's NHS plans on The Guardian's website when I found a link inviting me to "Talk About It Here!"

The Brave NewLabour World was young and what lay behind that simple order was a brand new soapbox where unrepentant, unreconstructed lefties like me could shout and scream to our hearts' content about and at liberals and conservatives, with and without capitals.

After lurking for a while, my first post was to answer a question about the Reynolds Girls on one of the quiz threads. "Tommy" was taken so I appended my favourite wrestling reference to create the user name I've used all over ever since. EvilWillow was the first poster to "talk" to me. One of my earliest posts was to ask what "Googling" meant (Alta Vista being the only search engine I knew).

Over the years I crossed metaphorical swords with worthy opponents (Hyuey of the ridiculous spelling; I never could remember what combination of "u"s, "y"s and "e"s to search under), utter wankers (PatLogan; an opinion on everything and knowledge of nothing), eccentric geniuses (Coshipi; who created an alternative persona which fooled everyone and then wrote a book about it - The Reminiscences of Penny Lane by Clive Semmens), thoroughly decent coves (JohnKnoxLives; churchman, Caley Thistle fan and pie aficionado), bizarre fantasists (BYFSeagulls; football casual or bored schoolboy, you decide), soulmates (uberpedant, with a gig attendance history to die for) and dozens upon dozens of good eggs (Kerebus, DirtyOrigamist, Tolstoy, BoogieBabe, Snazz, Moog & Princess, Policywatcher, Myrtletree, Jani, Culder, the late SueGeeGee and too many more to mention).

TommyDGNR8 was banned after an ill-advised comment about the reason for Sir Alex Ferguson's red nose but a "new" poster called SizeOfAnElephant mysteriously appeared and carried on discussions in his place. That is until mods' pet Rory grassed him up . A similar fate awaited CareCaseInAPaperHat, but TheScotsman (the diarist at that paper stole many of his stories from the football thread over the years) lasted until the (very) bitter end.

Our little community saw births, marriages and deaths; a genuine microcosm of the real world. The planet changed; 9/11 brought an influx of mad American republicans; the NewLabour dream turned sour; every twist, every turn was reflected in and filtered through GUT.

X-Factor was more fun when dissected online; Albion Rovers talk was as welcome if not moreso than Manchester United drivel; the regulars in the IT folder could solve just about any computer problem; there was always some trivia or nonsense to while away a dull half hour.

People suffering from depression, teetering on the edge of nervous breakdown, struggling with drink or drugs problems or coming to terms with bereavement; all were there, all were helped.

And at 5.30pm on Friday the 25th of February 2011, they turned it off.

Within hours, the Wikipedia entry for Guardian Unlimited carried a memorial;

In February 2011 The Guardian closed down their talkboards which had been online for over a decade. This was viewed as worse than a thousand Hitlers and widely regarded as being the internet equivalent of what Thatcher did to mining communities in the eighties.

It was also the view of most that The Guardian, in closing down the talkboard without warning or consultation, were a bunch of gritpypes.

That sums up the GUT spirit better than I ever could.

Within days, it had been removed, which probably says more about The Guardian.

Their paper's fucking rotten, too.