A taste of their own medicine

I'm jittery at the best of times. But at 2am, returning from Kilburn station, with an indiscrete figure hanging in the background, I was downright paranoid. Man up, you might say. Stop hallucinating. Cut the melodrama.

And that is precisely what I attempted to do. Diligently, I deployed anti-stalk (not, by the way, a form of discrimination against the main stem of a herbaceous plant): I crossed the road, he did likewise. I crossed back, so did he. Game on, because by this point we'd reached my patch.

Approaching my block, I decided to walk the long way around. 25 meters behind was our 'friend'. Then I thought of a plan: as soon as I was out of eyesight (i.e. had rounded the corner of the block), I sprinted at a lung-bursting pace around the rest of the block, passing my house on the way. And by the time he had rounded the corner (the same one that I had just passed) I was behind him, breathing loudly, shuffling my footsteps.

This, apparently, was too much for our 'friend'. After a few furtive glances over his shoulder, he ran away. The moral of the story: it is possible to out-stalk a stalker. (Assuming, of course, that is what he was.)