To be villified by strangers was a new and unpleasant feeling for Harvey. But that was clearly the potential price of his kind of fame. To catch a glimpse of oneself, splattered across the front page of a tabloid below a suitably derogatory and fictional headline was something he would have to get used to, he supposed.

So, trying very hard to ignore the strangeness born of having a camera-wielding bald man in his front garden, sipping steaming tea from a polystyrene cup and periodically glancing at him through the half-drawn curtains, Harvey sat down at his computer and began to type.

After no more than ten keystrokes he stopped again.

What were the criteria, he wondered, for being a media-villain? Could he do anything to change himself into a media-hero? Was there a way to transform himself from a hated Posh into a revered Becks? And if so, would he actually want to do it? Would it make that much of a difference to his life?

Harvey leaned back from the computer screen and his office chair squeaked as he reclined. He should oil that. Or maybe, now that he was a celebrity he should just throw it away and buy a bigger one. Extravagance would be expected of him from here on out and if he didn't haul himself on to that bandwagon he might find himself plunged yet further down the journalistic love-list, for being mean and old-fashioned. Could they genuinely find out if he fixed his old items rather than replace them?

Harvey looked up and caught the eye of his resident photographer through the gap in the curtains. He gave him a polite smile and the camera flashed back at him. Harvey blinked. He'd have to completely close the curtains in order to oil his chair.

What would be the advantages then, mused Harvey as he switched off the monitor and relocated to his violet sofa, of being loved by the papers? Passers-by would demand an autograph instead of shouting an obscenity for one thing. His mind sat on this for a medium-sized moment. Well... receiving verbal abuse takes far less effort that signing a name. Harvey interrogated himself with a silent hum. And people would expect him to be pleasant. What a boring irritation that would prove to be: Popping out for milk and cat food on a drizzly Sunday morning for example, would require a certain level of forced jollity towards strangers and vendors even though Harvey simply detested leaving homely warmth on rain-soaked weekends to buy forgotten groceries. It was his pet peeve.

The case for a nasty public image was mounting. He'd never be invited to take part in charity telethons without pay because no one would want to see him. Mixing with loveable yet stupid 'socialites' would be a very rare occurence because of the danger of his evil reputation tarring them.

Harvey smiled. If he could set his press-likeability rating to somewhere very low; say to somewhere lower than Paris Hilton, but higher than a serial paedophile, his media-haranguing would be intense (that was unavoidable) but crucially would require very little effort on his part.

To be villified by strangers was a new and unpleasant experience for Harvey, albeit one he could get positively used to.

And so, during the following days and weeks, Harvey made concerted eforts to project a very negative image of himself. Rumours of him pushing into queues, swearing loudly in front of children and even an utterly untrue one about him drunkenly assaulting a stranger at a taxi rank outside of a nightclub began to be banded around the pages of the glossier magazines.

On the 17th of August, which happened to be a particularly quiet news day, and as Harvey was starting to settle down as a baddie, he was thrilled to find a giant photograph of himself on the second page of a newspaper with very high circulation figures. There he was, opposite Nikki, 19 from Romford, in a picture taken through wide open curtains, spraying WD40 onto the rusty turning mechanism of a tatty office chair. "Tight-fisted Harvey Dark" as the journal had tagged him, was well on the way to acheiving his aim.