SHE kept a dead squirrel under her desk.

That's what they'd say, my colleagues, after the fact. There was a cutlass under there too. She had a Supergirl pencil case with matching rubber and sharpener - notions of grandeur, so she had. Supergirl? Aye, right.

Listen, the squirrel was a present. He's called Frank and he doesn't do any harm, just sits. Ditto the Supergirl pencil case and the cutlass.

Being hapless and prone to misadventure, I worry constantly about what the papers might dig up, should I stumble across a cold corpse and be pinned as the main suspect. Or if I found myself befuddled at the centre of a hijacking, a bank robbery or an assassination plot.

Remember Chris Jefferies, arrested for the murder of Joanna Yeates in 2010 and released without charge shortly after? He had blue hair, so obviously was the killer. In fact, his hair wasn't just blue, it was "all over the place". Besides, his neighbour said he was a "man who keeps himself to himself".

He liked Christina Rossetti, who writes a bit about death, had "dirty fingernails" and was an "active Liberal Democrat". What more do you need for a guilty verdict?

Of course, Mr Jefferies was not guilty and, at the Leveson inquiry, said he would "never fully recover" from the vilification by the press.

Yet here we go again with Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah, pilot of missing Malaysian Airlines flight MH370. Fanatical, you'd be led to believe. He's pictured wearing a T-shirt reading Democracy Is Dead, so that's that decided. Another photo is nicely cropped to show him smiling broadly while holding up a meat cleaver. It looks vaguely alarming in isolation. Uncropped, there's a chopping board and some mince.

CNN has gone through the internet, hunting out his engagement on web forums. On a German site he posted about building a flight simulator. "On a YouTube channel, Zaharie gives workman's tips on tinkering with a refrigerator and an air conditioner."

Well, you know what they say about men who tinker with refrigerators.

Apparently, he'd stopped speaking to his wife in the weeks running up the crash. This was later rubbished by Captain Zaharie's family. A quote, also refuted, said he was, "disturbed and lost in a world of his own".

I hope I never end up in the papers. Imagine the unedited comments from acquaintances and the context-less lifts from the internet. Facebook shows me dressed variously as an angel, She-ra and a black cat: "As her photos show, Stewart was believed to dabble in the dark arts as a means to escape her loneliness. 'We never saw her with a man,' one neighbour said. 'But we did see her in a mask at the end of October'."

Other photos show cake. "One friend said: 'I'm not surprised she became involved in an assassination attempt. We always knew her aptitude with buttercream would sour." My social media footprint has me masked, feral, armed with cake, undermining social norms and contemptuous of weddings.

Most of us could be edited to look like weirdos. Some of us wouldn't need much editing. In an unsympathetic hand, a photo of you in the pub is a sign you were a rabble rouser; pictured knitting and you're a recluse.

You can blame social media for this sad trend, to editorialise to the point of fairytale telling, you can blame rolling news. You could point the finger towards the audience with an appetite for these fake fronts of complex, inscrutable lives. The hunger for facts is replaced with a desire for cheap detail, no matter the truth.

I'm going to prepare a statement for the press, with file pictures and a biography, in case of disaster. It's only a matter of time before the She-ra picture ends up on CNN and by then it will be too late to explain.