Imagine how you would feel if you were walking home from the pub and realised you were being followed.

It happened to us the other night – me, my wife and our son.

To check our suspicions we even doubled back on ourselves and took an alternative route, but still he followed, and this went on for a good half a mile.

“How are we going to shake him off?”

Our route home takes us past my brother’s house, and we considered calling in there for sanctuary, but you can’t go alarming people like that, knocking on their door, late at night, and landing them with your problems.

“This is all your fault,” said my wife, in that tone she always adopts when she thinks I’m to blame, which is quite often.

“How can this be my fault?” I protest.

“Well you’re the one who insisted on giving him a cuddle back there. He wouldn’t be following us otherwise.”

I can’t deny it, but then all the cats I see in the street bring out an urge in me to pick them up, tickle them under the chin and rub their ears. This time it had, indeed, been a mistake.

So intent was he on tailing us that at one point he nearly wandered in the path of a car, oblivious to the traffic, and he would have followed us all the way home if we had let him.

For one brief, mad moment, this actually occurred to us as an option because we are, in fact, starting the process of obtaining a second cat.

Perhaps it was even meant to be, and it wouldn’t count as catnapping because a cat wouldn’t normally wander so far unless it was homeless. Would it?

But we came to the conclusion that this one would.

Cats – like humans – range from the amazingly clever to the not very bright, and if I said this one was a bit dim, it would be an understatement. Without doubt, we had found the dimmest cat in Swindon.

You could let him follow you all the way home and then he would be your cat, but only until anybody, or anything, came past your house, at which point he would be off following them all the way home too.

So now we had a dilemma. Just how do you get rid of a cat that wants to stick to you like glue?

In the end we walked all the way back to where I had made the mistake of picking him up in the first place, by now half an hour ago, in the hope he would recognise his neighbourhood and go home.

No chance. While we stood under a lamppost, discussing tactics, he sat patiently at our feet, looking up at us and wondering where the game would take him next.

There was only one thing for it. My son would have to pick him up for a minute, while we started running as fast as our old legs would carry us, getting a head start.

Then he would throw the cat over the highest hedge possible and start legging it too.

It’s surprising how fast and how far you can run when you are trying to escape a stalker, and only when we were out of breath did we look back to discover we had finally shaken him off. It’s lucky for us that there was nobody around to report our suspicious actions to the police, and we have learned a lesson that you should also heed. If you are walking home from the pub and you feel like cuddling a stranger, don’t.