Do you have a stalker? Should you? I ask, having found myself involved in a lunchtime conversation earlier this week at a smart London press club. None of us was exactly a household name (we’re not talking Jonathan, still less Diana, Ross here) but each was slightly-to-moderately known: names you might just recognise; the not-quite-famous.

You’ve heard of name-dropping? What we were involved in was what any cynical eavesdropper would at once have recognised as stalker-dropping.

“Do you have one?” I heard myself saying to the near-celeb woman next to me.

“Not at the moment. Mine committed suicide.”

Murmurs of sympathy. “You poor thing! You must have felt awful.”

“Yes. He’d been sectioned. I didn’t know what he might do. It was the staff at my office I felt sorry for – having to take his awful calls.”

“Gosh – but didn’t a little bit of you feel relieved when the police told you he’d . . . well, killed himself?”

Tactful silence from respondent.

Moos of understanding from the rest of us.

On discovering that another member of our group had had not one but two stalkers, I felt under pressure to stake my own claim. “I’ve only ever had one,” I confessed, “but she was a nightmare. I’d met her at a party. She wore a leopard-skin jumpsuit. After that, thousands of phone calls – for years.”

“My dear, how creepy – didn’t you call the police?”

“Oh,” I demurred, with fake male bashfulness, “it’s a man thing, I guess, but I didn’t. I felt I ought not to need the police to protect me from a woman who was drinking too much. Truth is, I was a teeny bit flattered that I could be obsessively interesting to anyone at all, even if she didn’t interest me.” Nods of fellow feeling.

There was a fourth person chatting with us but after a while she left the conversation. Poor love – I suppose she’d never even had a stalker.

It’s hard for a columnist to judge how hard and how often to beat a drum. I went on for too long about Tony Blair being a delusional poseur, and after nearly a decade probably became a bore on the subject. History may prove me right – but then again, history may have other things on its mind. Yet after banging on a great deal ten years ago about cheating in British television, I now rather wish I’d stuck to my guns rather than dropping the subject when nobody seemed much bothered.

And my new dilemma is Gordon Brown. I keep saying this – but the man hasn’t got the ghost of a plan. Not an idea in his head. Anyone with ears to hear could guess as much from his speech and media interviews on Monday. “Citizens’ juries” across the country to advise the Government on policy? Spare us. Why doesn’t he advise the Government? He’s the Prime Minister.

What leaps from Mr Brown’s interviews is not the intellectual colossus that some of my Fleet Street colleagues describe, but an ambitious school bursar with a powerful ego, a good head for figures and a big gap in his brain where a creative political imagination ought to be.

Mr Brown interviews like a frightened man, desperate to bore and bulldoze his way through 15 minutes without saying anything.

Can’t you hear that? Should I keep saying it? Or is it time to shut up?

The Derbyshire Peak District, like the Pyrenees from which I recently returned, is suffering from an infestation of walking sticks. These idiotic shiny poles are the new must-have for hikers. Across Europe, a fortune is being spent on long, super-light, state-of-the-art, carbon-fibre (or whatever) spikes, of which most walkers now carry two, one in each hand. They are perfectly useless. You even see able-bodied people trying to employ them on metalled roads.

The yomping or mountaineering circumstances in which sticks are a help rather than something extra to carry are unusual. At other times, and for all but the lame or unsteady, a ridiculous-looking painted pole is just an expensive nuisance. Have sticks joined the lengthening list of accoutrements whose purchase, possession and display is more about looking cool and kitted-out than about useful function? There’s a whole class of visitors to the countryside these days for whom I suspect getting the gear is the most important thing. Thus the human animal evolves from four legs to two, only to revert.

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