You've got my number. Please stop using it

AT EXACTLY 27 minutes past three every afternoon my telephone rings. I pick it up. Silence. "Hello, hello," I say. Still silence. No embarrassed shuffling, no scrabbling to replace the receiver, no heavy breathing, even. I put the phone down, count 10, pick it up and listen. My mute caller is still there listening, waiting.

Telephone silence is spooky. I don't like being spooked. I dial 1471 but naturally the caller has withheld his number. In the next 15 minutes I get six more of these silent calls, and then my friend Nick telephones to ask whether seven across could be "existentialist" - it's certainly 14 letters beginning blank x ending i blank t - and I know I'm back on stream.

I've been getting these calls for the last two weeks. If I'm out when they call, they register blank on the answering machine.

I rang the operator, who put me through to a special number for nuisance calls. Did I want to change my telephone number, asked the nuisance-call operator. Change my telephone number? Was he mad? I've had this telephone number longer than I've had my bonsai, my library card, my Bradford & Bingley account, my husband.

"Certainly not," I said. "Why can't you find out who's calling me and arrest them?" There must be some law, surely, against this sort of oral stalking. The nuisance-call operator said they couldn't find out who was ringing, but the chances were that it was a power-dialler.

I've heard of power dressing and power lunching, but power-dialling? Confused visions passed before my eyes, of big men in dirty raincoats with padded shoulders, smiling menacingly as they jabbed the buttons of their S series Mercedes car phones.

What's a power-dialler? "It's a computer," said the nuisance-call operator. My name and telephone number, probably my address as well, were in a telesales computer whose operator was probably on her tea break. They're usually women. In her absence the computer automatically dialled the calls but wasn't programmed to give the time-honoured spiel about the untold millions I'd save if I were to install a fitted kitchen, double-glazing or a loft extension within the next two weeks. "But why can't they switch their computers off when they're having their tea break?" I protested. "And anyway, how did they get my number?"

Here's the sinister bit. The last time I ordered anything by mail order I must have forgotten to tick the box saying "I do not wish my personal details to be passed on to any other sales organisation", advised the operator. "What tick? What box? What mail order?" I squealed, starting to feel paranoid.

I don't order things by post. I live four floors above a retail mecca called the King's Road, for heaven's sake. I don't need to order things by post.

"Do you ever get junk mail, catalogues, financial advice, that sort of thing?" asked the operator. "Yes, of course I do, dozens of them, and I chuck them away unopened."

"Ah," said the operator, "That's the problem. If you don't read the brochures you won't get to the refusal box. I can request that your number be removed from the major telesales lists, and with any luck most of your power-dialled calls should stop."

Next morning I got my usual quota of junk mail. I tore open the first envelope, containing a flimsy home health mail-order catalogue with a picture of a smiling brunette on an exercise bicycle on the cover, crammed full of the sort of merchandise no high-street shop could possibly display. Such as the nose and ear hair-trimmer for pounds 5.95, or the reusable incontinence shields, machine washable. Personally, when I get to the sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans bladder control stage I'd sooner have the portable urinal featured on page 18, pounds 6.95 or two for pounds 12. That solves next year's Christmas presents.

Hang on, though; on page 22 there's a picture of an ingenious device called a portable bidet, curiously surgical-looking in design. It's even got a soap-holder. It sits over most lavatories and has a hook for easy storage. But if it's portable and you pack it in your case to stay with friends, do you really want to hang it up in their bathroom next to their pink flannels and fleecy guest towels? Far better play safe and hang it in the back of your car beside the fluffy dice.

There was a whole section on dental hygiene, with ultrasonic denture cream and a stainless steel tongue-scraper to cure halitosis. You could scrape your tongue as you're sitting on your portable bidet in your friend's weekend cottage. Please God she has a lock on the bathroom door.

I never got as far as the refusal box - what's a little power-dialling between friends anyway?