third person

The scribblanity blog was saved from scrapping by the simple switching of the blog to being written in a third person perspective, thereby hopefully making it obvious that scribblans himself was an innocent bystander in events. He was also happy he had no idea who the first and second party were and couldn't therefore identify them in a line-up.

Of course it did have a downside in the UK, because when you mentioned something was third person, a lot of readers would mistakenly get that mixed up with third party and assume that the next words were going to be 'fire and theft'.

Scribblans was not a fan of fire or theft in general, although he had to admit that fire was handy if you had a pub or retail business that wasn't going so well. And probably theft was handy then too, as long as you managed to get it done just before the fire.

Anyway, the point was that the author was happier to write scribblanity and include scribblans in the page as a third person, rather than have readers believe that scribblans was one and the same person as the author, thereby achieving the subtle layer of separation that the author intended and keeping the personage of scribblans at arms length. 

Which is of course the very least distance that he is safe at, although unfortunately you can still smell him from there.