The Times website paywall.

And a very warm welcome to all our readers from The Times. We're very sorry you awoke to find you could no longer read your newspaper online without a credit card and we feel your pain.

We couldn't get into the Times site either last week when it was supposed to still be free as the registration system had crashed. But we can help you through this trauma. Call it a belief in an open internet or care in the community if you like, but here at the Guardian we can offer everything you ever wanted from the Times – and more – for nothing.

I suppose I ought to start by introducing myself. I write the weekly Digested Reads, among other things. As this is a sales pitch, I've been asked to mention that the new Oxford Book of Parodies says I'm one of Britain's best parodists, dead or alive. You can work out which.

To many of you, much of our website may seem a bit unfamiliar. We're not going to try to hide the fact that on certain – make that all – issues we tend to be the teensiest bit liberal.

But don't let that scare you. We don't bite. Very hard. And we do have a few of our very own Tories writing for us, though apparently they don't like being called Tories so I'm not allowed to say who they are as they have friends in very high places and could get me fired.

It's possible you last read the Guardian when the sports coverage ran to a single line – "Last night England lost 4-1 to Germany in a game of Association Football". Well just check it out now. We suspect you'll find it rather more interesting and fun these days.

And the same goes for all the other subjects we cover – politics, comment, education, environment, books, film, music, TV and a whole load more.

There's no need to miss your favourite columnists either. We know you like Caitlin Moran's Celebrity Watch but excellent though Caitlin is, check out her inspiration: Marina Hyde's Lost in Showbiz. (Sample quote: "Until Wednesday, Madonna had appeared to be dealing with the Guy-shaped hole in her existence the best way she knows how: by frotting a couple of nuns on stage every night in a crowd-thrilling tableau that hints at both the eternal fragility of the human heart and the recession-proof nature of amyl nitrate.")

We've never quite understood your fascination with Giles Coren, especially as his much more talented sister Victoria writes for us twice (yes twice) a week, but each to their own.

And look, we've got loads of other great writers — Patrick Wintour, Gary Younge, Polly Toynbee, Amelia Gentleman, Zoe Williams, Simon Hattenstone, Michael Billington, Simon Jenkins, Alexis Petridis and dozens of others who will knife me in the front when I get back into the office for not giving them a namecheck.

We can also guarantee to be a 100% Melanie Phillips-free zone – although we are happy to count her as one of our most avid readers. She's always moaning about us on her Spectator blog.

To make you feel right at home, we run a selection of interminably dull pieces by the great and the good that no one but the commissioning editor ever finishes, but I'm not allowed to mention who they are for much the same reason as I can't name the Tories.

But if you stick with us, you'll soon work out who they are and stop reading them for yourselves.

There will of course be a few very noticeable differences. We don't always write about Rupert Murdoch in the way the North Korean media reports Kim Jong-il and we have occasionally made a critical remark about Sky and News International.

You may however find it refreshing that we do also criticise the Guardian Media Group when they step out of line.

We're told that most of you read the Times online just for Jeremy Clarkson. But look, he's here too! Or rather his avatar is. But we don't think you will be able to tell the difference ...

What's the point of Norway? On the night I stood having a cigarette outside Lillehammer's equivalent to Piccadilly Circus, I didn't see a single car. I felt like a lonely fat poof hanging around outside a public lavatory, while my friends George and Michael were inside getting it on with an Eskimo in salmon-pink, reindeer-skin chaps. And talking of which, here's the Mazda MX-5, the gayest car ever built.

Fighting my way past the scores of Hungarian paedophiles and Muslims wearing waistcoats packed with explosives whom Tony Bliar and his multicultural cronies have personally invited into this country brings me nicely on to the Lexus. Here's another piece of foreign rubbish we could do without. If we filled every Lexus with Germaine Greer and her bunch of dungaree-wearing lesbians and sent them back to Japan, the country would be a far better place.

OK, so it was me who wrote that.

And if you get fed up with too many words – as I'm guessing you might well be by now – then catch up with all our podcasts and videos. So don't be shy. Have a look around wherever you fancy. We can guarantee you'll have fun and it won't cost you a penny. Come on in. Thirty million online readers can't all be wrong.