We’ve all seen appalling stories of people, usually – but not exclusively – women, being stalked by a spurned suitor, and how this can have terrifying and sometimes life-threatening sequelae.
However, the popularity of social media has brought about the advent of the less dangerous but mighty irritating social media stalker – or ‘smalker’, as I like to call them. The smalker is usually a spurned friend who has been chewing her lips with fury since you removed her from your Facebook ‘friends’ list. Sometimes they only requested to be your ‘friend’ in the first place so they could lurk on your page, twisting their face into a sucking-a-wasp grimace: an upside-down smile with a wrinkled nose. They are cantankerous loners and, for some reason, many of them are poets who have not attained the level of literary success they feel they deserve.
You can spot a smalker because, even while they are on your friends list, they never contribute a pleasant comment, like or other positive emoticon. They lie in wait for you to write something they can pick a fight with – and that’s the only time they will comment – unless they shoehorn a link to their woeful poetry inappropriately into an unrelated thread.
They are often narcissists. I had a smalker who I initially thought was just a pleasant woman with a similar love for art and books. However, I soon realised that she saw me as a stepping stone to commercial and literary success, because I received more than 40 private messages from her asking me to review one or another of her little-known books in The Spectator.
Being a polite and jolly sort of person until my buttons are pushed, I initially responded with sunny little replies, praising the poem she had shared from her book, and saying regretfully that I wasn’t free to review anything I wanted in The Spectator’s book pages, and that my long-suffering – and bestowed-with-saintly-patience – literary editor had limited space each week in which to review all the interesting books published recently, and that I already suggested too many titles to him to bother him with books I hadn’t read.
But still the messages kept coming. My smalker seemed oblivious to my social media posts about being admitted to hospital for a leg amputation; or ten massive gastro bleeds in five years; or for pneumonia eight times; or for a heart attack; or for a blocked superior vena cava; or for a smashed tibia and fibula; or for endless casts and external fixators for the above; or for gangrene on my remaining leg and, ultimately, for another leg amputation – complicated by two weeks in the high-dependency unit for bilateral pneumonia and heart failure – and then a bowel obstruction back on the ward. To these posts there was no response whatsoever.
Sometimes it was fairly surreal, being connected to lines and monitors and IV drips and respiratory tubing, on 100 per cent oxygen with a strong possibility of not recovering, and hearing little ‘dings’ as the smalker sent yet another link to the same old book or a reading of hers. There were moments of grim humour, as when I noticed from my hospital bed that she always referred to herself in the third person. I wondered if I was dealing with the ghost of Princess Margaret – with an ego to match.
They are cantankerous loners and, for some reason, many of them are poets
In the end, I unfriended her. And there was peace for a couple of years. But then, for some reason, she searched for a post of mine that was open to the public and not just friends, and swooped on it like a vulture. I had written in defence of Israel weeks after the pogrom on 7 October. From this, almost two years later, she deduced that I was in favour of genocide of Gazans, and declared as such in a fairly hysterical post in my thread.
She also saw fit to bring up the fact that I ‘professed to have been a doctor’, which she saw as paradoxical to my belief that the terrorist group Hamas – and certainly not innocent civilians in Gaza – should be rendered powerless by Israeli forces. The doctor thing amused as well as enraged me; I have heard whispered variations of it before by authors who have taken umbrage at a mere doctor being asked to write reviews of fiction books by a national publication. I can usually silence this bitchiness by pointing out that I’ve been published since I was 17, when I was hired by New Musical Express and by No1 magazine, and that since then I’ve written for around 50 national and international publications, with stints as news editor in two journals and regular columns in a broadsheet and two magazines.
As for dismantling the accusation of ‘professing to be a doctor’, I pointed out that I was indeed a retired doctor and that in my time I had been the physician in charge of all medical admissions at the biggest hospital in the west end of Edinburgh, and had my full postgraduate physicians’ exams, as well as passing the full postgrad exams in anaesthetics and working as a consultant anaesthetist in charge of all emergency anaesthetics in Glasgow.
But it’s a waste of time arguing with a smalker. They are usually angry inside and just searching for people to smite. But the only way I’m smitten is my love for my husband, friends and life. It’s funny how it’s sometimes those whose bodies are decrepit who squeeze the most joy out of life. I’ll leave my narcissistic smalker to harangue someone else with 40 emails about her overwrought poetry.
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