‘No way am I having it now,’ said a friend, as she insisted on discussing the latest scare stories.

And she shook her head so violently that her long blonde hair was flung sideways across her face, and the resemblance to an anti-vaxxer in the throes of hysteria was extremely convincing.

But then she regained her composure and said: ‘No. I’ve had my two jabs. That’s enough.’

‘Hang on,’ I said, ‘so you are vaccinated?’

‘Oh yes, but I’ve only had two. I’m not having any more.’ And she emphasised the ‘I’m’ with a smug look that said she was no fool, unlike others unspecified.

This is what is happening now. There is an annoying new kind of johnny-come-lately anti-vaxxer who boasts about being only minimally vaccinated and in their view, therefore, qualified to join the ranks of the persecuted – those of us who decided at the very beginning not to have a single dose, for allegedly lunatic reasons.

It never seems to occur to these semi-vaxxers that they are about as credible to a real anti-vaxxer as a dirty vegan to a fruitarian. Someone who enjoys the odd burger on the weekend should not presume to empathise with a properly translucent nut-job – and by that I mean someone who likes eating nuts.

Being an anti-vaxxer, for me, involved working assiduously to attain mad lady in the attic status. I put in years of neurotically obsessing. I sat at my laptop daily with my hair standing on end searching for details that were hard to find on the internet. I printed off charts and went through them with a red pen. I send hundreds upon hundreds of emails to the one friend I knew who thought like me as we deluged each other in bizarrely niche information we had found on Rumble, or in the annals of the FDA, or the CDC.

I can honestly say I went down the rabbit hole.

I became a social pariah, and if I remember rightly, and I think I do, at one point people like me were told we might not be allowed to go to the shops to buy food.

I don’t think that put me off one bit. In fact, I recall that when the idea surfaced that I might soon be under a form of house arrest, permitted only to have home deliveries until I saw the light and had a series of injections, I crossed a line into a place of total commitment to my own increasingly paranoid ideas.

And sometimes I feel I will never come back from that.

For ages, there were so few people like me that, aside from the builder boyfriend, I had barely anyone to talk to. Consequently, I got used to being in a very small, very cosy sort of club.

If I now want to hang out with my own kind, that’s not my fault. It’s the fault of those who pushed me into that siege mentality in the first place.

‘We’re not the same, you and I,’ is what I wanted to say to this friend who was machine gunning me with scare stories, but I didn’t. I’ve already lost half my social circle by refusing to have the jab, so it would be foolish to either lose the other half or not get back some of the first half by scorning their desire to join in with my alleged lunacy now.

Those who once crossed the street to avoid me now make a beeline to declare: ‘I’ve only had… [fill in number]’ and I have to welcome them into the club, even though, clearly, it’s a private members’ deal.

I did have a quick poke at this friend. I couldn’t resist asking why she had two, as if I didn’t already know.

‘To travel, darling. You couldn’t go anywhere if you weren’t jabbed.’ ‘I didn’t go anywhere,’ I said. We haven’t had a holiday since Greece four years ago.

I would love to go away, but even though we can now fly to pretty much anywhere I would want to, the horses hamper our ability to organise ourselves.

I would have to travel alone and leave the builder boyfriend behind to do the animals. But what I really want is for him and me to lie on a beach together.

The whole point of a holiday would be for us to be somewhere warm and relaxing in each other’s company, instead of wet and cold, halfway up our welly boots in frozen puddles, rolling round bales across fields, smashing ice in tanks, hauling water containers.

But I do remember, at the height of it all, when we were told we might never be allowed to go anywhere again, thinking that if this is the extent of our world, then I’m happy with it.