My neighbour had screamed at us in the street because our removal van had transgressed that invisible line which demarcated our parking space, in a public street, from her own. This was in the first week of our moving in.

Over time we had stones thrown through our greenhouse, I once caught her letting down the tyres on my car. She would shout abuse over the hedges and bad-mouthed us to our neighbours - neighbours who would tell us what a menace she was but who would say nothing to her face. It seems I had been the first person to dare stand up to her.

In time the police became involved. They couldn’t or wouldn’t do anything regarding the criminal damage but they cautioned her regarding her harassment of us as neighbours.

Perhaps we should have known better than to move in. Her garden was a mess of old cars, boats, caravans, weeds and unruly trees. She was a woman in her 60s who lived alone, you’ll not be surprised to hear, and who I strongly suspect suffered from a personality disorder.

She was petty, vindictive and far from being above criminality. It was a perfect foil for my own petty and vindictive side. This was, I feel I must stress, before my days as a therapist. I’m a little past such things now but here, dear reader, begins the tale of my petty vengeance.

There used to be a website called freecycle. You’d post up stuff you no longer wanted and arrange for it to be collected, for free, by anybody who wanted it. I used it on occasion myself and so had an account.

One day I was skim-reading the various items up for grabs and noticed that she had posted a request. Did anybody have any buttons, beads and suchlike to give away? She wanted to make jewellery from buttons and beads, sell them at a local craft fair, and any quantity would be gratefully received.

It was now that my passive aggressive side leapt into action. I invented a feminine email address and joined freecycle under my new identity.

I posted the following on freecycle:

“Hello

I have a large jar full of different sized buttons, beads and other
such things. Does anybody have any use for them?”

Lo and behold, she got in touch. I told her that I lived on a nearby military base and that she could go to the checkpoint on a certain day to collect a large jar of buttons which my mother, a one-time seamstress, had left upon her death.

I laughed inwardly as I imagined her driving up to the soldiers on guard and having them search the checkpoint for buttons.

She emailed to say that the buttons hadn’t been there when she’d called. I apologised profusely and told her that my father had been ill that morning and I’d had to rush off.

So, she accepted the apology and sped off to fetch those buttons which I now assured her would be there upon her arrival. The soldiers must have thought her mad.

She emailed me again and I told her that I had gone to see a medium and that the spirit of my dead mother had appeared, telling me to make jewellery from the buttons and sell them at a local craft fair.

She didn’t like that. I received a most impolite response.

Well, she must have found some buttons eventually because she later advertised again, asking for a trestle table which she could use at a fair.

Well, what a marvellous thing that was. My colleagues and I were having great fun reading her responses and would watch in howls of laughter as I typed my responses.

I invented a new email address and posed as an old gentleman who lived in the middle of a long street with no parking. He had an old but very sturdy trestle table and she was more than welcome to have it.

She would have to drive a good way, park and then walk a good way along the street to this house.

A time was arranged and so she set off for her prize. Alas, poor John later received an annoyed email telling him that she had gone to the address given and that there was nobody called John living there.

‘John’ apologised for his typo. He lived at number 67, not 68. A slip of his poor old fingers, nothing more.

She must have gone back a second time because poor old John received an incredibly rude email.

I then wrote back as John’s wife, apologising and explaining that John had just died and had suffered from alzheimers in the last years of his life.

My neighbour’s search for a trestle table continued and a new email address was forged, a new identity donned and a new offer made. Steve promised to drop them round and leave them in her garden. They were just taking up space in his garage and he wanted them gone.

I had had to change my writing style, for fear that she’d soon notice the similarities between the different emails. Steve had dyslexia and a very simplistic grasp of grammatical rules. I was a teacher at the time and so had plenty of exemplar materials to draw from.

Twice Steve promised to drive the tables round and twice this busy tradesperson had been too rushed off his feet to find the time.

After the third let down she enquired as to when she might receive them to which Steve replied that he had mentioned his tables to a friend and this friend had heard of my neighbour and told him of what a witch she was. He had therefore just burned them in his back garden and so she wouldn’t be getting them after all.

I wish I had kept copies of the replies I received. My initial offer of buttons and beads is all I could find in my collection of 15000 emails. In any case, Quora wouldn’t allow the language.

My neighbour died some years later. Nobody mourned her passing.

On clearing the garden the new neighbours found a self-portrait, in clay, buried under weeds. I now have a life sized clay head of my troublesome neighbour as a trophy.