I have become increasingly popular. Not for these opinion pieces, before you all rush to the comments section to correct me, but for spam phone calls.

In fact, for the last month or so, I’ve been getting several a day. They have, as you can imagine, become extremely annoying.

And they are all on exactly the same topic.

They disarm me at first. They know my name. They know what car I drive. They even have its registration plate. They are, without question, becoming an almighty pain in the backside.

I thought they were easing off a few weeks ago when I went a whole day without getting one. They were clearly just catching their breath before the next big push. It’s been relentless.

Because, dear reader, I never realised that buying a second-hand diesel car seven years ago would cause me to want to pull the few strands of hair I have sprouting on my head clean out.

Welcome to my diesel emissions spam phone call hell.

Perhaps these folk who certainly sound like they’re calling from abroad but seem to have phone numbers in Bolton, London, Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds (to name but a mere handful) are actually trying to help me.

But I’m pretty certain they are not. And, frankly, even if they were, I’m not interested.

In short, they want me to make a claim for compensation as I was sold a diesel car which may be emitting higher pollutants than I was led to believe.

Now, I’d like to claim I bought my car thinking it was less harmful to the environment than others. The reality is that it simply fitted my budget and needs. If money was no object, I’d buy differently, but why fib?

So I don’t feel like I’d be in a position to put my name on a legal case against the manufacturer.

The very last thing I am ever going to do is take a cold-caller up on their offer of pretty much anything in this day and age

But this is almost immaterial, as the very last thing I am ever going to do is take a cold-caller up on their offer of pretty much anything in this day and age.

And certainly not someone – there may be lots of different firms ringing me, I have no idea – who decides that approaching me repeatedly is the way to my heart. It isn’t. It’s merely the way to me blocking their number.

Not that it deters them. Because the next time, it’s simply a different number which my phone tells me is from some random city in the UK.

I always fear not answering phone calls for fear of missing something important. For reasons only my warped mind can explain, I always think ‘is this the People’s Postcode Lottery ringing me to say I’ve won £10m and if I don’t answer they’ll call the next lucky winner instead so they can send a minor celeb round to present them an outsized cheque that was rightfully mine’?

I am, of course, an idiot. I have, however, now decided I’ll risk missing out on a life-changing amount of cash and all calls from one of those aforementioned cities I simply ignore.

Needless to say, I headed to Google to see if I was alone in being bombarded by these frustratingly frequent calls. Shock, horror, I was not.

In fact by the time I’d started typing ‘diesel emissions…’ into my browser, an option was to complete my sentence with ‘…spam phone calls’.

People who no longer own the car they are being phoned about get them – and everyone reports initially being wrong-footed by the details they have on them. Most concerningly, there appears no way out, either.

Yes, I could report them to the Information Commissioner’s Office or the Telephone Preference Service – but I highly doubt these people play by their rules. So I haven’t bothered.

Anyway, you’ll have to excuse me, as I’ve got a call coming through from a Bolton number. I wonder who that could be?