I invited him in for a cup of tea and he told me about his missionary work with Ukrainian orphans. Later I walked up the road with him to the bus stop. Very slowly, a bit breathlessly, in his brogues. I thought his visit was charming but some people thought the electoral roll thing was a bit creepy.
When I told my therapist she said: "And you worry that YOU are a stalker!" I do, actually. Not that I have a terribly award-winning body of work as a stalker, but not for the first time, I was thinking you do have to be a bit obsessive to write a column like this.
There is both a wincing grandiosity and a constipated indignation in being an opinion writer. "Claim that something is offensive and it is as if the assertion itself has automatically become an argument," noted Christopher Hitchens, who was pretty good at pissing people off.
This week I got interviewed by journalist Adam Dudding about Pebbles Hooper's tweet which riled people and his opening gambit was: "You like to be provocative, don't you?" Hell, I'm not sure that I do, actually Adam. I seem to find it trickier and trickier to get mad as hell.
I appear to have lost my previously devout faith in the importance of being affronted. Sure, I know we need people to be thoughtfully outraged or the world wouldn't change for the better: we wouldn't have Rosa Parks or Martin Luther King or Maurice Williamson. But opinion columns can also be a personal rubbish dump.
How many journalists write attack pieces to placate their inner demons? I know as a business journalist I feverishly pursued Eric Watson and Mark Hotchin with a satisfying yet almost stalkerish aggression. How many journalists were bullied as children and are now (unconsciously) getting their own back?
Here's how it works: "When children are hurt and in pain psychologically they don't want to be in distress, so when the situation becomes intolerable they cease to identify with themselves. When they feel most threatened they will choose to identify with the person who is the source of their suffering in an attempt to possess that person's strength." (Robert Firestone).
Thus, the bullied becomes the bully. I used to think an invigorating argument cleared the sinuses, but of recent times I've decided I would prefer to learn things than argue about them.
My main subject so far: you guessed it, myself. This week I read four books about limerence: a term for a kind of obsessive infatuation, typically experienced involuntarily and characterised by a strong desire for reciprocation of one's feelings but not primarily for a sexual relationship. I have spent years feeling deep shame about my limerant nature.
"Limerants who had suffered often blamed weaknesses in their own character for their pain," Dorothy Tennov, who coined the term, declared. I am a writer but I cannot describe the profound, ear-pounding, transcendent effect that sentence had on me. It might have changed my life.
Being like this is not my fault! And other people feel like this too! "What my studies suggest is limerence, while illogical, is also normal." Yee-ha. After I read all that, I had this weird floaty experience where all of a sudden I could suddenly see everything so vividly, the icelandic poppies outside Parnell library, my cup of Earl Grey tea with two teabags, buying fresh vegetables.
Everything so ordinary but also just so, so GOOD and suddenly I felt not only grateful but much more interested in everything other than myself. Maybe there is a way to change the world without being angry all the time.
Malcolm X said: "We cannot think of being acceptable to others until we have first proven acceptable to ourselves."
