IF my obituary, or that of one of my nearest and dearest, appears elsewhere in this week's D&S Times, it will be entirely my fault, because I broke the chain.

Not only did I fail to forward an e-mail to ten friends within three hours, I didn't forward it at all and deleted it from my "in box".

Now others who did do as they were told had amazingly good luck (no examples given) but slackers like me (more than enough examples given) went under a lorry next time they ventured outdoors, or their loved ones crashed their cars pronto, always with fatal results.

After all these scaremongering tales came a poem of such saccharin sentimentality that it made Patience Strong sound callous. I wouldn't have forwarded it to my worst enemy, never mind ten people I actually liked - and they would probably have rung each other to inquire if I was still of sound mind.

As it happens, even if I'd been minded to scare the daylights out of ten friends, I'd have missed the three-hour deadline as I'd been thoughtless enough to spend the evening at the cinema (Bride and Prejudice - warm, funny, happy and 100pc entertainment) so didn't pick the beastly thing up until it was "too late".

Deadlines just hours away add a new twist to the age-old unpleasantness of the chain letter. Not everyone is on broadband, constantly checking and opening their mails almost as they arrive. Most people have a life.

I generally check the day's batch sometime during the evening and that, I imagine, is what is done by most of us who use e-mail mainly to keep in touch with our children.

Sadly, even though I always destroy or delete chain communications and risk the consequences, this one undermined all the pleasure the evening out had engendered and left me feeling quite shaky. Luckily I'm fairly strong-minded and there was also someone else in the house to bolster my decision to kick this beastly thing into touch and to make me some coffee. Do the senders of these chain letters or e-mails, raking round their address books to decide which friends or acquaintances to use in a bid to fend off their own ill-luck, ever consider that the recipient may live alone?

In the case of the above example, someone may be waiting to hear that one of their offspring has safely completed a long motorway journey. The three-hour deadline has expired, they have fewer than the required number of contacts in their e-mail address book, the gruesome tales of broken chains have upset them and there's no-one in the house to say: "Look, they're stupid, forget it and have some coffee."

Do some multiplication and work out that, if any chain were ever completed, the speed of e-mail would bid to rival Puck in "putting a girdle round about the earth in forty minutes". Then ask anyone you know who's on e-mail if they received a copy of your latest example. Probably not. I put out a web log appeal and no-one had, so chains are being broken all the time without doom and disaster haunting our every step.

Use the delete button. It's what it's there for.

But I do have one problem with that chain e-mail. I want a tactful way to mail the friend who sent it, asking her not to do it again.