Oh, I had a great time with my neighbour. She was in her 60s but this didn’t stop her letting down the tyres on my car (I caught her in the act), throwing stones through our greenhouse, shouting obscenities through the hedges and other such things. She was almost arrested for harassment so she really was deserving of what follows.

There used to be a site called freecycle, on which you’d say that you had something and would someone else just take it from you, for free… You could also ask for stuff.

One day I spotted that she was asking for things and so I invented a whole series of personas and led her to all kinds of random houses, military bases and hard to get to places in search of those items my personas claimed to possess.

These personas would invariably receive annoyed emails to state that the person in the house didn’t know what she was talking about, the soldiers on the checkpoint had refused her entry etc etc. I’d then pretend to be the persona’s wife, in reply, apologising for my husband’s dementia and confusion or I’d say that I’d found out who she was and that since she was so universally despised in the locality I’d not give her the item etc etc. At other times I’d apologise for having made a typo and so would correct the house number and so have her return for a second wasted journey.

I kept this up for a few weeks and she must have made over a dozen fruitless journeys. She had real anger-management issues and so I’d have lots of pleasure from imagining her rages.

Very passive aggressive but very, very, very satisfying.

The neighbour has since smoked herself to death. By that time I’d taught her the meaning of respecting one’s neighbours and we spent her last years in peace.