AS if getting our own nuisance phone calls isn’t bad enough. Now we are getting somebody else’s.

The phone rang and the voice on the other hand said: “Good morning.

Can I speak to Mrs Lewis?”

Don’t ask me how I knew, but it became immediately obvious that the person on the other end was calling to sell something. I don’t suppose we are born with a sixth sense about these things or the human race has evolved to be able to spot them a mile off, but you just know, don’t you?

There are several ways to end a phone call like that, but telling the truth isn’t usually one of them.

My normal ploy is to lie through my teeth and say that whatever they are trying to sell me, they are a week late. A new will? We wrote one last week. New windows? Funnily enough, we’ve just had some new ones put in. Mis-sold PPI? We got a big cheque on Thursday.

I’m not the kind of person who feels comfortable with telling lies, however, so it’s a relief and actually strangely satisfying when you can get off the hook simply by telling the truth about the elusive Mrs Lewis.

“Sorry,” I reply. “There is nobody here by that name.”

A few seconds pass while the person on the other end digests this surprising development and tries to work out what to do about it.

The poor devil has clearly only been taught one way to make the sale, and if the computer at his end has inadvertently put Mrs Lewis’s name against Mr Carter’s number, or swapped us round, he’s stuck.

But hold on… he’s had an idea.

“Mrs Glenys Lewis?” he suggests, as if being more specific about which Mrs Lewis he is trying to get hold of is going to help.

Perhaps she does live here after all, but I am the kind of person who struggles to remember the name of all the people who live under our roof.

Perhaps she lives under the stairs, so had slipped my mind.

“No,” I stress. “We definitely don’t have anybody called Glenys or Lewis living here, so you must have the wrong number.”

Three different people have phoned for her now, proving that Mrs Lewis is on a salesman’s hit list that is being copied from one nuisance caller to the next.

If they were legitimate callers, they wouldn’t keep trying to call her on the wrong number.

One of the callers actually apologised for wasting my time, which was ironic because that’s exactly what he was intending to do with Mrs Lewis’s time.

If it happens again I might just contact a website I’ve heard of, called mastersofrevenge.com.

They make a living by phoning your nuisance callers at all hours, in return for money – which is all very well if you can get their number and you’re sure it’s right.

I would hate to think they were phoning Mrs Lewis by mistake.

What I should really do, if I had the nerve, is follow the example of one person who came up with the perfect response to one nuisance call, and recorded it all for posting on YouTube.

His ploy was to pretend to be at the scene of a murder and then ask the caller what his connection with the late Mrs Lewis is, and would he mind coming down to the station to help the police with their enquiries?

Hopefully that’s what Mrs Lewis will do, the next time the phone rings and somebody asks her if they can speak to Mr Carter.