So why did I follow these people?
Seemples. I didn't.
Like a knitwit, I had clicked on "follow with google friend connect" on someone's blog - so now all their friends appeared in my updates.
I have been googling for England trying to get rid of this oh-so-marvelous feature, but with little success. I have manually deleted myself form lots of followed blogs, some of which I probably wanted to keep!

If you have any idea how I can get friends connect off my blog - please help! I really don't want to delete my followers, they're much too precious!