I am beginning to appreciate my late father’s somewhat draconian philosophy on dealing with people who are really toads in disguise. He de-existed them if what they had done was so morally/physically/socially unacceptable that there would never be a chance of reconciliation.

This was not an act of violence on his part. Nothing happened to the culprit aside from the factoid that their entire existence ceased from my father’s point of view. He would not speak to them, of them, about them, or even waste a thought on them. They were a waste of space and he has house-cleaned his contact list. Should another person bring up the name of the culprit in conversation to him, then his response would be, ‘Let’s not talk about that’, and he wouldn’t.

He was right. Social media toads generally crawl back under their slimy rock if they are ignored.