Diary of a glass-half-empty person 26

I had hoped that my life, along with that of Consuela (my Tejana maid) would be peaceful and undisturbed. However, I reckoned without the lurker upon the opposite hilltop. Remember him? No? The person who had been stalking us for months, on whom we sprang a dawn ambush, whom we reported to the Police, and who subsequently walked free when the wheels of Scottish justice ground to a sudden procedural halt? Och, you must remember him! Aye, aye, the chap who cracked on that he was Wes Studi.

Well, the bugger’s back.

No lurking now but brazen openness. It seems we only have to step out of our tepee and he’s there, on the opposite hilltop, binox on a tripod, Thermos flask in one hand and a cheese-and-pickle piece in the other. He’s on Twitter foreby, updating all-and-sundry about what he’s doing and, more intrusively, about what we’re doing.

Last week the ‘flash mobs’ started. Hordes of his followers turned up and made a day of it.

Consuela’s answer to all this is simple. “Give them something to look at,” she said to me the other day. She had been rummaging in the extensive cellars here at the tepee (honestly you would not believe what we can pack into such an apparently small space), and had found our bikinis. When I asked her what she imagined we could do with them she said, “The weather’s warming up, let’s give them some bikini-aerobics to look at – show them we don’t give a monkey’s!”

Consuela is fast becoming fluent in British idiom.

However, I have to say that I declined to participate. Consuela has a large bust and a flat stomach, whereas I am her diametric opposite in those respects. The upshot was that she has been going out solo to do her bends and stretches. She had been doing it for a week when we received a visit from the Police. An impossibly young man and young woman wearing high-vis stab-vests hung about with radios, telescopic batons, handcuffs, fly-whisks, saucepans, bath-plugs, and so on turned up at the flap of the tepee. I made sure Consuela was downstairs and quiet.

“There’ve been complaints’” they said. A cup of Earl Grey and some shortbread rounds softened them, as did the sight of this inoffensive, plain, middle-aged woman in joggers. I think I convinced them that I was the injured party in the matter.

The following day’s flash mob was effectively ‘kettled’ for ten hours on the opposite hilltop by a large number of Tayside’s Finest.

As my friend Lucy says: “Revenge is a dish best served cold… with a cherry on top!”