‘You’re one of them anti-vaxxers,’ said the brusque northerner who was seated opposite me at a friend’s supper party. ‘Why do you think I got Covid and was really ill even though I’m up to date on my jabs?’

And he fixed me with a murderous stare. I said: ‘I think you’ve got the wrong end of the stick.’ Next to me, the builder boyfriend was wearing his glassy-eyed look of panic.

We can feel a dinner-party vaccination lynching coming a mile off. But this was peculiarly alarming.

The last time I saw this fellow he had been fuming with me for not having the jab. Barely a year later, he was fuming because he had had it.

How am I getting the blame for the other side of the argument as well now? How is that even remotely possible? My host and the other guests were in the kitchen chatting but soon they would return to the table and find me in the midst of yet another one of those rows unless I found a way to defuse it. So much of the past two years has baffled my grasp of social etiquette.

‘Dear Mary, I am unvaccinated. What is the polite thing to say or do at a dinner party when faced with a pro-vaxxer who is furious because he believes his vaccine has not worked and he is holding you personally responsible, for some reason?’

‘Well?’ said the northern chap. I gulped. He looked as though he was going to lean across the table full of Indian takeaway food and slap me in the face with a naan bread.

I affected a deeply apologetic tone. ‘I’m not a spokesperson for non-Covid vaccination,’ I said, carefully. ‘I mean, I don’t know anything. Honestly, I’m just an idiot who decided to go against all medical and government advice.’

‘Aye!’ said the chap. ‘How did you work it out?’ I told him I hadn’t worked anything out. I just fell for a conspiracy theory like I fall for every conspiracy theory under the sun. And maybe I got lucky this one time, or maybe I didn’t. It’s totally random. I always believe the underdog and I always give most credence to the idea that is most shouted down and laughed at. It’s how I work. I watch all those video discussions online that they try to take down. I read Vaers data for a laugh. I look at pictures of shadows on the moon landings. Nobody should feel they have to lower themselves to my level.

If anything, this idea that we must have an amnesty where pro- and anti-vaxxers all come together and decide to live in peace and harmony is the final insult. We should all stay in our respective corners, where we are happiest.

I suspect this chap wanted a big blow-out row to clear the air so he could feel better about telling me he was coming around to my way of thinking. But I don’t want him to. I want him to stay with his way of thinking.

‘Please,’ I said to him. ‘You did the right thing. Imagine how bad Covid would have been if you had not been jabbed.’ ‘I thought you said you had it and it was just like flu?’ he shouted, incredulous.

Why, oh why had I told him that? ‘Yes, but it was really awful, wasn’t it?’ And I nudged the builder b, who said: ‘Terrible. She was screaming in agony. Both of us were. It was the worst illness we’ve ever had. We thought we might be on the way out at one point, didn’t we?’

‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘He went down a tunnel and met Jesus who told him to go back because it wasn’t his time.’ This was what the BB had claimed at the time, although of course he was delirious.

Our dinner companion looked at us suspiciously. ‘Hmm. Well… I suppose. But all I’m saying is, what the hell point was the vaccine, eh? Eh?’

I sighed. There was nothing else for it, so I said: ‘I don’t know. I’m sorry.’

This seemed to hit the spot. He sat back and took a swig of beer.

For my next trick, I am thinking of joining the growing movement of people in America who have grown so suspicious of the official line on everything that they have persuaded themselves the Earth is flat. Well, it’s a sort of disc shape, apparently, with ice around the outsides and rock underneath. It either floats in space, or, as the more lavish theories go, there is no space. That’s a conspiracy.

If I were in government, I would be thinking very long and hard about why trust in our institutions has plummeted to such a low that people are starting to question the curvature of the Earth.

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