I haven’t been very regular with my postings for the last few months, and therefore when I noticed the site had grown slow, I put off investigating it.

Tonight I first upgraded to the latest version of WP and then took a closer look.
I found that SafeTserver had an outdated DNS nameserver defined and Akismet was timing out attempting to communicate with its web site.

Problem now solved, my site returns to its former glorious ignominy; carry on.