Real life | 25 February 2016

The last time I bought a set of tyres in south London I came away not quite knowing whether I had just been asked to become a jihadi bride.

Of course, it was only the merest suspicion. If I had had hard evidence I might have gone to the police. Or I might not. These days, one is likely to get done for a hate crime if one complains about a member of the opposite religion. If I had gone to the police what would I have said?

‘Excuse me, I’ve just had a set of tyres fitted to my Volvo by a man who tried to persuade me that IS fighters don’t deserve the bad press.’

Would I have sounded hysterical, or delusional, or just plain prejudiced? And what was my suspicion based on? Not that much.

I thought about it a lot but really all I had was the fact that, as I sat in the waiting room with the spaniel as my tyres were fitted, a very handsome young man sitting at his desk beneath a huge gold-framed excerpt from the Koran told me I shouldn’t listen to ‘the hype’ about Isis, who weren’t the barbarians they were made out to be. He knew this, he said, because he was just back from a top-secret mission in the Middle East, which he couldn’t elaborate on.

As my new tyres were fitted, he tried to recruit me as a jihadi bride

He said I should consider converting and marrying a man like him because I would find that my life really took off at that point. I gulped and nodded. I thought it unlikely that going under the veil would make me happy but he had me in a bind.