Sarah Wieding and her sketch of the man she got talking to on the N31 night bus

I’M sure we have all at some stage had a chance encounter with someone that we hoped we’d see again.

Perhaps you caught the eye of a woman on the tube, only to see her get up to leave at the next stop, or chatted to a nice young man on a park bench but felt too embarrassed to ask for contact details.

I spoke to Sarah Wieding this week who is hoping to be reunited with an army veteran she met on the N31 bus.

The pair hit it off after chatting about his time serving in Afghanistan, his 17-year-old daughter and how he was once in a coma. But after jumping off the bus in a hurry after nearly missing her stop, she forgot to ask for his contact details.

She has been putting up posters along the route, through Westbourne Grove and Maida Vale, in the hope of finding him again.

But when the traveller from Berlin posted about him online, complete with a sketch she made, she was hit back with a wave of criticism and negativity from trolls, comparing her to the stalker in the Baby Reindeer series.

The office clerk, who is studying art history, told me: “He approached and asked me about the bus. And then we just started chatting, and it turned into a full conversation. He sat next to me and we kept talking. It was really, really nice. It was just a very pure and very honest and very kind conversation.”

Ms Wieding said she had few details about him except that he had “red- blonde hair, blue eyes and a prominent scar on his lower left cheek” from when he got shot in the face.

She went to pubs in Camden Town to see if anyone knew him but said: “It turns out there were quite a few regulars with prominent scars on their left cheek. Everybody knew a person, but it was not the person.”

There have been no responses so far but a post about the search has gone viral on Reddit – for all the wrong reasons. Ms Wieding received a slew of negative comments comparing her to “Baby Reindeer”, the female stalker in Richard Gadd’s Netflix series. She also said she got “roasted” after posting in an army veterans’ Facebook group, receiving many “misogynistic comments”. One person suggested that she was just after child support.

“It completely backfired,” Ms Wieding said. “I was pretty naive to think that this would work in London. In Germany, if you talk to someone and you fail to exchange contact details, you just put notes where the person might be or where the encounter happened. But now people are saying online, ‘We’re preparing for Baby Reindeer 2 season’. People think I’m a creep. The guy gave me his name, he was the one talking to me.

“[The interaction] just got stuck in my mind. And I thought, ‘Well, it is my only chance to get back in touch because I’m leaving for Berlin on Sunday.’ I can fully understand if he doesn’t want to reconnect.

“The thing is, it’s not even about a romantic thing. I met one of my best friends in the same way 24 years ago. The newspapers made it out like I’m a love­struck woman who met my ‘dream man’ without even talking to me first.”