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tea-house in Ilkley). D’you know her? The Dutch girl with the strange eyebrows who Duncan calls ‘The Exclamation Mark’, because she always persists in looking alarmed (no matter how conservatively he orders).
    Honestly
, Jess, it’s just a
joke!
The ‘real’ and the ‘hyper-real’ and all that ‘fast-forwarding’! What’s she trying to do, turn us all digital?!
    Anyhow – to get back to our little spat – I was still recoiling from the ‘comedian’ comment, when Meredith suddenly started throwing in her
own
two-pence-worth, saying how she didn’t think you and I were ‘a terribly good influence on each other, and, by extension, on the group’.
    You and me, Jess? Not a good influence? What on earth can she possibly
mean?!
The bare-faced
gall
of the woman! The pure, unalloyed
cheek
of it! I just felt like grabbing her by her bony shoulders and shaking her and
shaking
her! I just felt like
screaming
into her horsey, self-satisfied face: ‘I’m a sixty-seven-year-old grandmother of five, Meredith! How
dare
you stand there in your awful, gold-braided, ethnic pantaloons and scold me like I’m a seven-year-old child!’
    But I just bit down hard on my tongue, Jess, and tried to rise above. Let it go, Emily, let it go, I thought. Do as the Good Lord would’ve done.
    (It wasn’t having all that much effect, I’m afraid, and then that thing
you’re
always saying popped into my head: ‘They only hate us because we’re beautiful!’
    I repeated it to myself, three times. It was
extremely
helpful.)
    Yet even
that
wasn’t to be the end of it, Jess! Worse was still to come! Seb then interrupts Meredith to say how ‘disruptive’ he’d found our contributions in Group Discussion!
    I must’ve looked simply
stunned
by this (I think I probably started wheezing again – with the shock – and then staggered back, supporting myself, faintly, with a trembling hand, against the wall) because Meredith quickly butted in to say how much they appreciated our input, overall, and that she couldn’t deny we’d invested a great deal of effort. (Remember our special DVD night, Jess?
The Name of the Rose, The Omen, The Da Vinci Code, Nacho Libre
and
The Passion of The Christ
, all in one go?)
    Seb wasn’t to be put off, though. He started muttering under his breath about how ‘unhelpful’ he’d found your views on the Catholic Church turning Mary Magdalen into a whore because ‘they all feared the vagina’.
    Obviously I leapt straight to your defence! I said
I’d
told you that because I’d read it on the internet.
    ‘Oh! On the internet, Emily!’ Seb snorts. ‘Well, that speaks
volumes
, doesn’t it?!’
    Then, before I can even open my mouth to respond, he continues, ‘And how about when you said Jesus “hated his own family”, and “thought Buddhism was a big pile of mumbo-jumbo”? Were these shining little gems
also
mined online?’
    Well, that was
it
, Jess!
    WAR!!
    I drew myself up to my full height (5′3″, in heels) and said (in my best Ice Queen voice), ‘If you want to take issue with
those
views, Sebastian, then I’m afraid you’ll need to take issue with the Holy Bible itself!’
    Meredith gazed at me for a second, perfectly astonished. ‘It says Jesus
hated
his own family in the Bible?’ she demanded (plainly shaken to the core).
    ‘I believe there’s a fairly memorable moment in the Gospel of St Matthew,’ I loftily enlightened her, ‘when Mary and Jesus’s brothers arrive, unannounced, to pay him a visit. A disciple comes to tell him (he’s preaching a sermon at the time) and Jesus refuses – point-blank – to interrupt what he’s doing to give them an audience. He simply asks, “Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?” Then, later on, he justifies this slightly high-handed treatment by saying, “Whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother,” i.e. Jesus doesn’t play favourites…’ (I deliver Meredith an especially , stern look