Scare in the community

I've never liked this bloke, even from the moment I first met him, about 38 years ago.

I realised that he was a self-obsessed, aggressive and obsessive bore, even before his madness took hold of him properly, sending him in and out of institutions and on and off medication.

When he was finally told to go away because we had had enough, he took to calling us up late at night and breathing heavily without any dialogue in between breaths, and sending us letters accusing us of hanging up 'psychic nooses' in his room when he was out. Every now and then, he would daub vicious graffiti on our front door, or smash the doorbell so it had to be replaced.

So I called the police and gave them permission that I thought I would never condone - to tap our phone and record his late-night calls for use as evidence to obtain an exclusion order against him, but it seems that if you actually want the police to tap your phone, it isn't so easy. If you don't want them to listen-in, then there is no problem at all.

I knew where he lived and I knew his number, so I tried calling him up for a change, but he just said he had never heard of me and slammed down the phone.

Eventually, I wrote him a letter stating that I did not care how mad he was, but if he carried on hanging around and making unwanted calls, I would get him sent back to the institution that intermittently released him so he could continue his chosen career of trying to scare people with his loony obsessions.

For a while, that did the trick and he would - if I ever saw him in the street - look away or down. The calls stopped as well. No matter how mad someone is, they generally respond to a good threat, just so long as it is made with conviction.

Well now he's back again and as mad as ever, hanging around outside, looking up at the windows and generally making a visual nuisance of himself.

I'm going to have to go over the road to talk to him again, and it won't be a polite conversation. I do NOT feel sorry for him, you see. He is - like a lot of mad people - another failed artist.