Letters received recently:

• from the police, with a crime number, promising to phone me if there are any developments
• from Victim Support, offering moral support
• from the police, miscellaneous local crime prevention advice, including a 41 page guide to personal safety

I have well and truly been tagged as a victim of crime.

Victim Support Lambeth phoned to offer me counselling, as they understood I was the victim of a vicious leaflet and might be living in fear.

Now, the leaflet did scare me, but in an intellectual way, not viscerally.

I’m partly impressed that they bothered to get in touch with me over something so relatively trivial, and partly bemused for the same reason.

I e-mailed the police, asking if they wanted a look at this leaflet. They said yes please, bring it in now if you can, so I have.

They’ll investigate it as a public order offence. All they’ve really got to go on is the PO Box address and it’ll take time for the Post Office to tell them who’s behind it. In the meantime, they’d like to know if anyone else receives it, just so they know where it’s been delivered.

They took the leaflet, and gave me a photocopy.

In a few days, they’ll give me a crime number.

How do you call for capital punishment, without using the phrase “capital punishment”, and without using words like “hanging” and “execution”?

( And can you guess which criminals they're at war with? ) I don’t see how anyone could have written the leaflet without thinking it would incite people to physically attack the men they picture — and other, innocent men who look like them.

A hateful glossy leaflet has been pushed through my mother’s door. It essentially calls for 5 local people to be murdered.

Lynch mobs scare me.