“I wouldn’t call myself ‘woke’,” I heard myself say. “I mean, would anyone here call themselves that?”

And in those few seconds, my life changed forever.

I had been looking down at the last of my hunter’s chicken and sautéed potatoes as I said this but was suddenly aware the dinner party had screeched to a halt like a stolen car over a spike strip.

“Well, ho ho ho, I don’t know about that,” guffawed Brig Daniels, our charming host, nervously dabbing his big white moustache with his napkin. “There’s some good stuff those folks are doing, too, Jess.”

I looked up from my meal to see six alarmed faces staring at me. Somewhere, through the French doors and beyond the veranda and maybe at the end of the very long lawn, I was sure I heard a leaf landing.

“Well, I feel woke,” said Angela, immaculate in a floral lace cocktail dress. Of course she did. She was the most “woke” person I knew so why had I chosen that occasion to give my controversial statement its test flight? And in Angela’s own home, too (a stunning mansion on the Georgia coast) at her own soirée? Three glasses of wine on an empty stomach was why.

Sitting opposite me, my husband Brandon was gazing at the ceiling and repeating the word “woke” as if he were a wine nut attempting to discern a subtle note in a pinot noir. Similarly my best friend April, next to him, was laughing nervously and twisting her fingers in her hair. Thanks for the back-up, guys. Well, not their fault, I guess. This was all my doing.

“What is it that ails you, exactly?” asked Brig. He was in his sixties and one of those old school Southern gentlemen who effortlessly charm you in a blur of blazers and luxuriant moustaches. What some modern people would call the patriarchy. I don’t mind a bit of patriarchy myself. I like the charm.

“The amount of it,” I blurted. “It’s everywhere and everything. I can barely open my inbox at work for all the emails about diversity courses and values and inclusivity and whatever new phrase it is this month. And don’t get me started on that ridiculous bookshop in town. I should have learned my lesson but I keep going in and looking for, I don’t know, any book that isn’t about a grievance, a complaint, an injustice. I walked in there last week and tripped over a customer who was taking the knee.”

“Chapter and Voice?” said Angela, all hushed tones and earnestness. “I’ve heard about that store. I keep meaning to go in there.”

“I’ve been in there,” said Brig. “I thought they had a little coffee shop.”

“Every time I turn on Netflix I get this propaganda pushed down my throat. When did we start accepting that any drama we watch will have a social message? What happened to drama just being entertainment? And people being fired for giving the most anodyne opinions at work. For the love of God, who thought we’d have to live through another McCarthy era in our lifetime?”

“No coffee shop though,” said Brig. “I must have been thinking of somewhere else.”

“Woke, hmmm,” said Bran. “Woke woke woke.” That man lops down trees with chainsaws any chance he gets, he walked away from a helicopter crash in Basra with no more than a broken arm and he breezes into fancy dan bars and sells them a ton of his beer without breaking a sweat but when it comes to the prospect of hurting someone’s feelings he might as well be one of the snowflakes.

“Well, I’m sorry, Jess, but that just sounds like what they call white fragility,” said Angela, her cutlery now back on the plate, the food getting cold (abandoned?). “And one thing I’ve tried to-.”

“And that’s another thing!” I cut in. “All those ridiculous phrases they’ve got so you can’t move a muscle without them saying well that’s white fragility or that’s X or that’s Y. You can give anything a label if you fancy it.”

In my best Kate Spade dress and with a curved bob haircut lovingly styled by Kelly at Truvy Tresses that very afternoon, I’d arrived at Brig and Angela’s with every intention of being a charming dinner guest. It was going horribly wrong.

“I like non-fiction mainly,” said Brig. He too had sunk quite a few glasses of wine from his cellar and was in a world of his own.

“We had an unconscious bias course at work this week,” said Brandon. Finally, something!

“And how was that?” said April.

“It was okay. I didn’t like the look of the guy when he walked in but he did a good job.”

Everyone seemed to miss the irony of his remark, which was a shame as some laughter might have defused the situation. As it was, we were all still stuck in the sweaty World War Two submarine that was the dinner party. You know, one of those movies where they all have to be totally silent or the Germans will drop bombs on them (apologies to any German readers).

“We had one on sexual harassment, too,” said Bran. “That was done by Stephanie from reception. She’s in her sixties and forgot to remove her MAGA cap.”

We met Angela and Brig when our previous cat, Jones, got hit by a car and then went to hide, wounded, behind their garage in the street next to ours. It was a little odd that we were friends. I got on better with Brig than Angela: he was easy company. I did love Angela but she was a classic champagne socialist – always running down the cops and talking about “powerful white men” although she had done rather well from Brig’s carefully nurtured portfolio.

They’d moved from Brunswick, the district of Truvy City where Bran, our son Jackson and I lived, to the uber-affluent Riverside area a couple of years ago. Their house had gorgeous pinewood flooring and elegant arched fireplaces and tasteful hand-painted pictures of old-time paddle steamers on the Halfmoon River, which raced silently past just a few feet beyond their back garden.

The other couple were Sarah and David Brooks, a neat, accomplished couple. He was high up in something and so was she. I really should listen when I’m introduced to people (do you have that problem, too? Oh good). Sarah and David weren’t going to get drunk and offer some rogue opinion on race relations. Was what I had done bad manners? It probably was. You were meant to avoid politics at dinner parties, weren’t you?

“Why are they taking a knee at the football games?” asked Brig. “I’ll tell you why: ’cos if they don’t they get accused of being racist. And why is that the only cause that gets the knee? How about victims of crime, how about the elderly, veterans left without pensions?”

“It’s certainly dividing people,” said Sarah. “At our son’s basketball games you’ve got some kids taking a knee, some standing, some parents shouting for their kids to stand up or get down, it’s like a bad game of Simon Says.”

Hurrah! Thank you, Brig! Thank you, Sarah! Maybe I wasn’t mad after all. Maybe I could pull my status back from “troublesome guest” to “instigator of stimulating chat”. Yes, it was all just a case of brand positioning.

“Yeah, our boy at his school, too,” said Bran. “And then some of the crowd won’t stand for the national anthem now and we sing that as a mark of respect to folk doing their duty overseas so that others can have the freedom to protest.”

“I’m just sick of it,” I said. “I don’t feel I have anything to apologise for. And the people who are starting this, a lot of them are activists, hard left, using the racist brush to bully people into doing what they want. I’m sick of hearing about them and their causes.”

“Well, we don’t want a white woman being bored with hearing about racism, how awful,” said Angela.

“I know that bookstore,” said Brig. “You can sit down and read their books.”

“Yes,” I said, “a white woman. You’ve heard of them, Angela. They’re thirty per cent of the population. White women like you and me and Sarah and your mom and my mom and all those nice women you grew up with, you must remember those?”

“Now you’re being facetious,” said Angela. “I’m not running down those nice people and you know it. I’m talking about injustice. I would have thought that as someone who works for a healthcare provider you’d have some empathy with people who don’t have much money.”

“I know how incredibly lucky I am that I was born into a stable, middle-class family,” I said. “And yes, I got to college and breezed into a job and live in a nice house in a nice part of town. I’m just saying I don’t think having to hear about white racism every time I go to work, and reading about diversity every time I open an email, is helpful or necessary.

“And neither do I believe that every one of the people behind these campaigns has some noble motive. A lot of odd characters have wormed their way into positions of power these past few years and nobody’s telling them to hit the road for fear of being called a bigot.”

“I think a lot of people are telling them to hit the road,” said David. Actually, he had a point.

“Black people have been treated with impunity by the police since this country was born and I think they’re right to take it to this next level,” said Angela. “Change doesn’t come to those who sit and wait. Young blacks are more likely to get longer prison sentences for drug possession than whites.”

“Oh those poor drug users,” I said. Sucking up to drug users is always high on a liberal’s list of priorities.

“And police are more likely to pull over black teenagers for traffic offences.”

“Are all your examples about lawbreakers?”

April sniggered but it turned out she was showing Sarah pictures of cats that looked like Taylor Swift. Sarah seemed uncomfortable, I’m guessing at the conversation Angela and I were having rather than at the identikit kittycats.

I felt alcohol doing that thing in your head where you can hear the blood rushing around it. I hated myself and I pictured tomorrow when I would hate myself even more, when the hangover paranoia kicked in and I would no doubt be apologising to everyone here, multiple times. Including with flowers.

“I stick to my Jack Reachers,” said Brig, swirling rosé round in the glass. “He has other people write them now but they’re still pretty good.”