LIZ JONES: There have been a lot of 'if onlys' in my life. Now, after a traumatic year, I’ve swallowed two citalopram tablets. So are antidepressants the answer?

I’ve swallowed two citalopram tablets. I keep waiting for my personality to change: I will be confident and arrogant and not answer emails for days, even weeks. I thought I might feel more relaxed on round two of my bid to assuage my stress by taking Teddy on a long walk. 

So, on Thursday, Nic and I chose a route in what I think is the most beautiful valley in the Dales. She brought her beagle, Boris, who is hugely strong. It didn’t go well. We saw a spaniel, and while Nic tried to contain Teddy, almost riding him in the process, Boris tried to back out of his harness. Crossing a field, I was worried it might contain cows with calves. ‘We need to run,’ I told Nic.

‘I’m not running,’ she said. ‘I’ve got our picnic on my back.’

Teddy spotted some rabbits. ‘Leave it!! Leave it!!’ I shouted, giving the command the dog trainer taught me. ‘Arrgh!’ We resembled French and Saunders, screaming, dragged backwards through nettles. But being in nature did work, in a way, as by the end we were hysterical with laughter and so exhausted I slept through the night for the first time in years. I had been holding too many leads to check my phone.

There was one sad moment of reflection, though. We passed the cottage with ten acres of woodland that I had tried to buy when fleeing Somerset in 2012. Back then it was £400,000; it’s up for sale again, with very little renovation bar a naff, ubiquitous kitchen extension, for nearly £800,000. But it is in an idyllic spot. The purchase had fallen through and I had bought a mini mansion instead, with a lawn stretching down to the Swale. 

It proved a disaster, as the farmer next door, not keen on single females buying houses, began to erect For Sale signs in my garden and daubed the word ‘witch’ in red paint on my barn wall. He would release his cattle on to the lane as I was nosing my new sports car out of my drive. He called Hilda, my aged Romanian rescue, ‘that foreign mutt’ and tried to kick her. He stalked Nic, who had moved from Somerset with me and lived in my cottage next door. He would drink and pass out on her doorstep, steal her underwear from the washing line, put a ladder up to her bedroom to gaze inside and steal her post. Like me, he was deaf, and would sign the words ‘Old lady. Old!’ whenever he saw me*. 

After several years, he was convicted and given a restraining order, which he broke the next day. But when I was forced to sell up (my then agent took 20 per cent of my severance pay when I was sacked for appearing in Celebrity Big Brother, which I took part in to pay my debts; that backfired nicely!), the house went for £400,000 less than I paid for it, despite the renovations: by law I had to declare the neighbour was a convicted stalker. I think the farmer had been trouble even before I bought the house – we later discovered an ex-girlfriend had fled to Manchester, while he threatened his mother with a gun – but, of course, no one thought to warn me. I could have sued my conveyancer, but by then I had run out of fight.

If only the purchase of the cottage had worked out, none of the next terrible ten years would have happened. Nic told me only recently that lots of newspapers reported my bankruptcy (I’d been too scared to google it); none of them mentioned the stalker had been allowed to stay on his farm and was a factor in me going under. He dropped down dead not long ago, which means for the first time Nic has been able to get in her car without checking the back seat, and venture inside Tesco without having her location reported to him (a checkout woman would ring him to say, ‘Nic is in the pet-food aisle’).

There have been a lot of ‘if onlys’, like: if only I hadn’t always been so scared I would have had a much happier, more stable life. And I wonder: are antidepressants the answer? Even the most well-adjusted person would be traumatised by what has happened in the past year alone.

*Why are men obsessed with how old women are? It is the last permissible prejudice standing.