As I slapped a rude note on a car parked outside my house, I realised that nature was taking its course. My transformation into a Surreyite was in danger of becoming complete.

‘If you have enjoyed using this private access track, then perhaps you might consider making a donation for its maintenance,’ I had snidely scrawled on a scrap of paper which I tucked under the wipers of the same Nissan crossover that always seems to be plonked there by some dog walker or other who can’t be bothered to drive further along the village green to park in the public car park.

Do I care? No. Of course I don’t. Was there plenty of other space? Loads. And yet I found myself writing this note. I watched my hand doing it as though I was inhabiting someone else’s body.

I stomped outside like a zombie and slapped the note on the car supposedly blocking the space next to my car where the builder boyfriend ought to be able to park his pick-up truck when he came home from a hard day’s work in this parallel universe I had stumbled into where this demonic thought had occurred to me.

I lifted the wipers and tucked the note underneath, making a harrumphing sound. And when a few minutes later another strange car pulled up outside my neighbour’s house – my neighbour who I don’t speak to – I scrawled another note. I’d got a taste for it now.

As a lady got out of her mid-range 4×4 and walked to the high street to do some shopping, perhaps meet a friend for a bite to eat in one of the cafés, I stormed out and slapped a note under her wipers.

Half an hour later I was upstairs when I heard the sound of children’s laughter outside. I raced to the bedroom window and saw a family getting out of their car to walk off on an outing with their rucksacks and pet dog.

Out came a square of paper and the note got scrawled again. ‘I am going to have to type this out and print off a load of them,’ was the strange thought that went through my head, as I realised what a mammoth task I was having, policing people’s behaviour.

Although I could tell on some level that I was losing the plot, I didn’t want to stop. This strange new creature was coming out of its chrysalis, and I wanted to meet it. What was it that I had become?

I marched forth again to push the note beneath the wipers.

A few hours later I heard them come back. The little boy shouted: ‘Look! We’ve got a letter!’ He sounded so happy I came to my senses. Ugh, I thought. I have become something quite horrible.

Luckily, it had rained so the note was probably obscured, a meaningless blur of watery ink, signifying nothing and giving no hint of the deranged motive that had led to it being there.

I heard the family get in their car and drive off. ‘Good riddance, parking in our residents’ spaces on our private access track…’ She was still in there, the mad, growling monster of a busybody inside. Later, she wheeled both her wheelie bins into the gap. They’re still there. She puts them out there every time the BB goes to work, or when I go out, to keep the space.

This is what seven years of living on a village green 45 minutes from London will do to you. So maybe only in the nick of time have I decided to go and live down a track in a remote part of Ireland, in a big, old rambling house, behind a huge gate, with the nearest neighbour a farmer and the only traffic the occasional passing tractor…

Before we can get there, however, we have to go through the conveyancing process, the box-ticking for which is far worse than I remember. Compliance is the buzzword. No one will believe anything unless it’s been compliance-ified.

The questions designed to make everything pass muster for all the rules and regs – this end, not Ireland – which seem to have weirdly proliferated since we left the EU are so petty-fogging there is almost no way to answer them.

Most of the buyer’s queries in the latest batch addressed to my solicitor concern a ‘risk-based’ independent electronic verification method by which he must prove, again, nine weeks down the line, that I really am who I say I am, and that I really am his client.

I suggested he reply: ‘Damn. You’ve caught me out. I actually have no idea who she is, or how she got her name on the Land Registry entry for that house. I wish I’d never set up this fake law firm to do international money-laundering.’