When I go home to my small Dorset-shire Village, I get called a DFL’er, i.e. a ‘Down From Londoner’. According to my native Swanage I do nothing at ‘work’ of any worth (not far from the truth) but supping on my skinny caramel macchiato and munching on my almond croissant.

However I have come to realise over my years in London that for every boho-cool, trilby-wearing Shoreditch resident there are at least ten notable crazies. So much so I began to make a diary of my encounters with these fascinating creatures, though it has been pointed out that in keeping this diary I am myself becoming reminiscent of said crazy clan; frantic character stealing blonde scribbles fervently in leather-bound diary.

So whether it’s tube-lady, fully clad in designer clothes with a handbag stuffed to the brim with loose chicken feathers. Or the man who seemed to be writing a new, highly secret and terribly important enigma code – only to discover as I leaned over his shoulder it was filled with hundreds of pages of meaningless squiggles.

But my personal favourite has to be Soho Tramp. I passed him whilst talking on my phone in the middle of the day, when, mid-swig of Diamond White he said: ‘can I ask you a question?’ to which I replied: ‘no I’m on the phone’.  His obvious response was that he ‘fucking loved my arsehole’.

What’s more worrying than the thought of a tramp with x-ray vision being able to see, not to mention ardently desire, my arsehole, was my desensitised response, pausing only briefly to rebuff: ‘I’m sorry. That’s not a question’.

Don’t get me wrong the countryside has its fair share of oddballs. In Swanage, the much endeared Telephone Man shuffles along the seafront with his hand clasped to his ear as if his thumb is the listening device of a telephone and his forefinger the talking end. No doubt he is talking to the enigma code man about page 78, paragraph two and squiggle number four.

Then we have the man who walks barefoot, regardless of season, into the second-hand clothes shops who asked me, aged 17, for a ‘hobbit cloak’ and informed me rather aggressively: ‘a cloak is different from a cape you know’.

There were also quite a few of them at my grandmother’s WI meetings. Delilah, who persisted in driving in first gear around the town, took to stock-piling crates of honey in her pantry as she had heard a dirty rumour around the parish that bees in the southern parts of Australia might become extinct in the next 20 years. ‘Fuck. Fuck. Alert. Better get 60 jars of runny honey quick sticks’.

Perhaps the only difference between these geographically opposed – one egg short of a Bundt Cake – weirdies is that the ones in the country sport the clothes the ones in London wore 20 years ago. Who knows maybe a Hobbit Cape was all the rage on a Knightsbridge-based 1980s crazy?