He may not be seeking companionship, but rather the opposite. Very likely his urgent desire is for nothing more than an opportunity to relieve himself in complete privacy. He just wants you to leave. He is one of the legion of Britons who suffer from paruresis.

From what? No, I’d never heard of it either until my colleague Anjana Ahuja mentioned it in her science notebook. Also known as shy bladder syndrome, it is a psychological condition that renders people unable to urinate in public lavatories. I asked Anjana if I could look at the full report. “Do you suffer from it?” she said. Since I started writing this column my colleagues have started suspecting that I have everything wrong with me. Or they suspect that I suspect that I have everything wrong with me. I try to explain that I just have an inquiring mind. It’s important to explore the possibilities. You never know what might be up with you.

I don’t normally have a problem urinating in public toilets. I choose my urinal carefully, of course. There’s no point jostling elbows with someone if it can be in any way avoided. And if there’s someone acting suspiciously (I know what I said about judging people, but sometimes you can’t help it, can you?) it’s best to bolt into a cubicle. But 95 per cent of the time I’m fine.

The other 5 per cent? Well, half-time in the bogs at a football match, when you’re jammed between two West Ham fans who are joking as they hose down the trough with pure lager while 100 of their buddies breathe down your neck, can be a paralysing situation. Ditto fancy restaurants with just two urinals and a guy standing behind you waiting in the silence to squirt soap, offer you aftershave and glare when you fail to tip him. It’s irrational, but suddenly the thought pops into your head: “What if I can’t go?” And then you can’t, no matter how hard you think of Niagara Falls.

The study by German psychologists describes paruresis as a form of social phobia and says that those who suffer badly eschew travel, decline social invitations and plan how much they drink to avoid the need to use public toilets. In a representative sample of German men, 2.8 per cent had the condition. Between 20 and 30 per cent of the sample were less comfortable urinating in public toilets than at home but were not classified as having paruresis. I am putting those of us who are timid in front of football crowds and soap squirters into this latter camp.

The UK Paruresis Association organises workshops for sufferers. The advice on its website (www.shybladder.org.uk) includes positive thinking, learning to relax at the urinal and adopting a “f*** everyone else” attitude as you “wait it out” until you finally go. It also offers tips on urinal etiquette, including a test that teaches which urinal to use when one or more of the other urinals are occupied. There are even photographs of well-designed, high-privacy toilets. One hopes that the photographers didn’t encounter too much violence as they prowled the nation’s public conveniences, cameras in hand.

Some people are so badly afflicted by paruresis that they can’t even urinate at home if there is somebody else in the house. Some women also have problems if someone is in an adjoining cubicle. This is less common, but I do recall an old friend telling me of an occasion when her boss, a formidable glossy magazine editrix, followed her into the lav and sat in the next cubicle urinating like a horse. My friend was temporarily frozen and had to sit it out until she left.

The reassuring message many will take from this research is that they are not alone. Let us only hope that they are not tempted to try to spot their fellow sufferers next time they are in a public toilet. That will just make a whole new lot of people distinctly nervous.

damian.whitworth@thetimes.co.uk