The hatchet-faced woman who shouted at me pulled out her lipstick and sat reapplying it during the meeting. The pretty young girl next to her took out a nail file and sat filing her nails, as people shared. She was wearing see-through, skin-tight, skin-coloured leggings and a pair of six-inch wedged boots.

I sat opposite them in the church hall and brooded. This used to be a support group but after 20 years of going it no longer feels like I am getting support. Lately, I feel worse when I come out.

The woman with the stern face screeched at me at another meeting recently when I tried to speak up for my friend, the bricklayer, who had been texted and told not to come again. When I asked why, she and the other women in the room shouted me down, and I had to leave.

He was turned away because of his criminal convictions, I was later informed. I looked at these two women now who had both been in the room that day, one putting on her lipstick and the other filing her nails as they listened to people’s stories, and the word that came into my head was ‘Tricoteuses’. The female gang who have formed a #MeToo movement to cleanse meetings of men they consider ‘unsafe’ are sitting by the guillotine doing their knitting while low bottom drunks are flung out to dry.

My friend has two previous non-violent convictions relating to break-ups with ex-girlfriends.

He has been banned from 20 meetings now and many of them he has never been to. He gets emails from the ‘safeguarding officer’ telling him he has been the subject of a vote, usually described rather gleefully as ‘unanimous’.

I send lots of emails to head office complaining, and mostly they ignore me. But the other day, to my astonishment, I received a long-winded reply from the Big Cheese himself. It was so high-handed and condescending, showed so little mercy, and dismissed my heartfelt pleas for my friend to be given a fair hearing and readmitted to meetings in such a facetious way, that I burst into tears.

I sat in my budget hotel room, where the builder boyfriend and I are ensconced until we take possession of our new house in Ireland, and I wept like a baby in front of my laptop screen, reading this pompous email.

Of course I am emotional because I have just moved house. But I am also distressed to be leaving behind a friend who needs me because I am one of too few people who have helped him as this #MeToo movement sets about him.

What has broken out is a form of hysteria so all-consuming that when my friend turns up to a venue he has not been to before, they call a business meeting for the following week and at that point he is invariably banned from attending again.

Isn’t a support group of this type meant to be there for those with criminal convictions? Don’t the prisons release people on probation to such meetings? Isn’t recovery most urgently and precisely for the trouble-makers and the emotionally screwed up? How can they ban the very people they are meant to help? But since the end of lockdown they do, in the name of safeguarding.

The Big Cheese who emailed me said the behaviour my friend is accused of is something he intends to ‘call out’. Ooh get you, I thought, wiping away tears.

One of the things the bricklayer is accused of doing is texting women members and one of the text exchanges they seized as evidence, which I have read and it’s very boring – ‘nice to see you at the meeting’, and so on – contains a kiss or ‘x’, which is being cited as proof of something or other that is considered shocking these days.

At almost the same time as I received my reply from the Big Cheese, a friend of mine who also complained about the new banning policy received a reply from him too. He forwarded it to me, wondering what to make of it. His letter was very friendly indeed, and culminated in the Big Cheese signing off with an ‘x’.

I have written to head office to ask why the Big Cheese is allowed to put an ‘x’ at the end of his emails while my friend the bricklayer is being banned from meetings for putting an ‘x’ at the end of his texts.

As for making everything ‘safe’, I once knew a bloke who threw chairs during meetings, he was so messed up and angry. The other men would grab him, calm him down outside, then bring him back in. That was what convinced me I was in the right place. I’m not so sure now.