I often wander about London in a bit of daze. This is just my way. Full of thoughts, ideas, musings. Sometimes I stop on the pavement and stand still, thinking. I’m just thinking about things, that’s all. Some people sit in parked cars for ages. I see these car-lurkers as I saunter along the residential avenues, and I’m slightly disturbed by them. Why are they sitting there? They can’t all be cab drivers.

But I don’t have a car. So I can only be strange and contemplative on foot. That’s my excuse.

I went to the Green Party office this afternoon to collect some leaflets, and when I left I was convinced they thought I was a bit strange. Then again, they must be used to dealing with people far stranger than me. Famously, their British media spokesman was once Mr David Icke, just before he got those visions about the importance of wearing turquoise, shape-shifting lizards controlling the world and being a Son Of God. And once he did start making public declarations about that sort of thing, the Party understandably relieved him of his position. There’s off-message and there’s really off-message.

I may not be that eccentric, but I do feel unusual enough to tempt suspicion from some strangers. My defence is, I’ve never been strange in a dangerous way. I’ve never gone up to someone and physically threatened them for no reason, for instance.

Which is what happened to me today on Archway Road at about 5.30pm. I was standing in my usual thoughtful daze, looking at the Green Party Shop from the other side of the busy road, trying to work out if its closed door meant it was actually closed or not. Sometimes the owner Mr Lynch keeps it open at this time, you see. I was also daydreaming at the same time about, oh, everything and nothing.

I then was aware of a 40-ish white man in a white baseball cap, white tracksuit and white trainers dodging the traffic and crossing the road from the other side, walking towards me. He was carrying a large plastic tray of washing-up implements: sponges, cloths, brushes, that sort of thing. They looked brand new, so my first assumption was that he was selling these items door-to-door, and that he was now about to ask me if I wanted to buy anything. I got ready with my expression of kindly dismissal. I was entirely unprepared for what happened next.

He made it to the pavement, stuck his face very close to mine, and burst into a torrent of expletives and violent threats.

“What the f— are you looking at, you c—? Are you f—ing looking at ME, you f—-ing c—? Why are you looking at me? Eh? Well? I’ll cut your f—ing face open. Were you f—ing looking at me?

Some of his teeth were missing.

I was very shocked at all this, suffice it to say. I wanted to say, no I wasn’t looking at him. That I hadn’t noticed him at all until he started crossing the road towards me. I wanted to say I had been staring at the shop across the road, and that he must have been standing in front of the shop and thought I was staring at him. I wanted to say he had made an entirely understandable mistake. Even if he was now reacting in a rather less understandable manner.

I wanted to say all that. But I just said, “No, I wasn’t looking at you. ”

He continued his onslaught of violent strangeness in my face, now telling me to go away. Not in so many words, of course. In fact, I think I’m pretty sure I heard him say “get the f—- out of here, you bald c—t.” Even though he was the bald one in this relationship. Presumably he meant to say “blond c—t”, but I definitely heard it as “bald”. It’s fair to say neither one of us was thinking particularly clearly at the time.

Part of me was thinking about what he was actually going to do to me, and what it might feel like. Could it be I secretly, sexually wanting him to hurt me? Was I deliberately acting in my dazed way in order to attract people like this, because I’m so untouched by human hands right now? The pain as proof of attention, as proof of deliberate contact. Masochism as a by-product of intense loneliness. A boy’s bullying at school being his first formative sexual experience, colouring everything in later life. These are, after all, things I’m fascinated about as a writer.

But this is what a therapist might infer. I disagree. I am not my work. Not all of it. Not all of the time. So I walked away down the street.

I really wanted to tell him, “You’ve just crossed a busy road at the risk of your own life, purely in order to come over and threaten mine. Can’t you f— off?”

But I didn’t, of course. I just staggered home, my Dickonish daze now upgraded from thoughtful and daydreamy to upset and shocked.

I got in and wanted someone to put their arms around me and comfort me. But there was no one, of course. I’m too strange for that.