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Colin’s nasal drone reached me, even after I’d dropped to the back of the group to put as much distance between us as possible. Until three Saturdays ago I hadn’t thought it possible for one human man to be so extraordinarily irritating, but until three Saturdays ago I hadn’t met Colin Sutherland, expert forager, misogynist and total fucking cunt.

“No, no Alison, my dear. I don’t have a fancy degree from a fancy University like you, but in my experience you often learn a little more from getting out there in the real world than you do from staring at books.”

I didn’t hear Alison’s reply over the grinding of my teeth. I tried to catch Mum’s eye, but she avoided my gaze and ducked away to gather some wild garlic from the hedgerow.

Mum and I had joined the Foraging Society in a desperate bid to start socialising again after lockdown. Neither of us liked sports or gardening, so foraging seemed like it might be a nice sociable activity that we could do safely outdoors.

And it would have been, if not for Colin.

As far as I could tell, nobody really liked Colin, but he was the group’s leader, so we were stuck with him. The women gritted their teeth and tolerated his patronising diatribes and occasional boob grazes at the post-forage drink because the rest of the group had, under Colin’s despotic reign, become a close little family.

You’d catch glances and smirks pass between members that spoke louder than words. Mum refused to meet my eyes for fear that she’d start laughing and not be able to explain why when Colin inevitably demanded to be involved in the joke.

I realised with a jolt that the group had stopped. Colin was crouching down to inspect a small white fungus on the ground.

“Gather round foragers, gather round. This is a very rare specimen indeed. This is the Guardian Angel - so called because of its wonderful antioxidant properties - it’s very good for you.”

Colin excitedly pulled out a mushroom knife from his pocket and cut it free.

“That will be lovely with my bit of dryad’s saddle and wild garlic. I might even microwave some leftover rice pudding for afters. What a treat!”

I saw Alison lean in and whisper something to him, but he stood up and replied at full volume.

“Oh, not I think not. While, of course, there are poisonous fungi, none of them are found in the UK and I have eaten Guardian Angel hundreds of times. I’ve never even heard of a Destroying Angel. And that’s arum in your basket, dear, not wild garlic. Never mind eh? You’ll get there - stick at it!”

Alison was desperate now.

“Colin, I'm serious. If you eat it you’ll die - there’s no cure. Look, I’ll show you. Oh crap - has anyone got their forager’s book? I’ve forgotten mine.”

Colin wasn’t listening. He’d forged on ahead, whistling happily to himself.

But I dropped back and slipped my Beginner’s Guide to Foraging from my back pocket and flicked quietly to the D section. I bent to compare the remaining mushrooms with the pictures in my book then quietly closed it and slipped it back into my pocket. I caught up to the group without saying a word.

‘Jesus, really?!’ yelled Kapre at whatever had just rudely interrupted her sleep.

‘Yes, really,’ said Jesus. ‘Your guy is about to make a mess with the microwave.’

Kapre blinked into the scene.

‘It’s fine,’ she managed to sound feeble and withering at the same time. ‘Those are Dryad's Saddle. He’s going to make them fucking disgusting, but they won’t do him any harm.’

‘I was thinking more about the fork.’

‘Holy-bollocking-shitfuck!’ Kapre suddenly realised the situation and lent in to blow at the fork and make it jangle in the bowl. She hoped to all Heaven she wouldn’t follow through with vomit. Spewing on the mortals was a big no-no, they covered that in the first week of angel training. It worked, the idiot man heard the rattle and removed the metal just before ruining his mushrooms in the microwave.

‘What were you doing last night?’ Jesus asked.

‘Drinks with the girls,’ Kapre answered on instinct. ‘Got carried away on the communal wine. Sorry, I knew I had a shift this morning. Won’t happen again, boss.’

‘There’s no hierarchy here,’ Jesus spoke in a way that made it clear there absolutely was a hierarchy and Kapre was in danger of tumbling rapidly down it if she wasn’t careful. ‘And you can always be honest with me.’

Of course, Kapre knew Jesus knew the truth, but there was no way she could open her mouth and admit she’d snuck into hell to drink whiskey and fuck demons until an hour before she started work, again. She closed her eyes and took a breath, catching echoes of sulphur in her nostrils. Her skin blushed as she remembered pushing it against the leathery body of a satanic soldier she hadn’t bothered to ask the name of.

Jesus coughed.

‘I’m awake!’ Kapre cried out, doing little to help herself. She opened her eyes and looked at the son of God, then followed his gaze to see the moronic mortal about to dive into the glowing red elements of a toaster with a butter knife. She all but kicked his hand off course before turning back to Jesus. ‘It’s fine, I’ve got this, I promise.’

The supercilious scion smiled and evanesced, leaving Kapre to pull herself into focus and keep her earthly idiot alive until she could clock off and pass out.

She realised the smell of sulphur was still there at the same time she used a wing feather to tickle her charge’s nose into noticing he’d left the gas on full.

The odour told Kapre what was going on, humans were idiots but this wasn’t natural. She squinted through the ether and saw exactly as expected. Forming a plan to turn the morning around, Kapre checked her breath and, satisfied it smelt more of bourbon than of bile, moved to her underworld prey.

‘If you weren’t here trying to kill him, I wouldn’t need to be here trying to save him,’ she whispered to the demon from behind, making sure her lips brushed the crispened skin of his ear as she did. ‘How about we…?’ she let her hand fall down his body.

As Kapre commenced the carnal corruption of yet another Devil’s henchman, an unwatched mortal turned blue, his airway blocked with a clump of soggy radiated fungus.

Hey guys, I need some help here. It’s about Jed. Well, I’m at my wit’s end.

The first time Jed tried to kill himself, and even then, that wasn’t real attempt – it was a spoon in the microwave. Or, as his mother called it, mee-crow-wah-vay. She had airs you see, ideas above her station. They had a posh house, this three-storey townhouse kind of place, grand and imposing, but crumbling away. His parents bought it in a pretty bad way before the property market took off, but they could never afford to do it up properly. So that was them, fifty years in that same house, watching the city gentrify around them as they, well she, left brochures for the QE2 around at coffee mornings.

Is it any wonder that Jed left one of her silver-spoon bests in the mee-crow-wah-vay the day after her funeral? He said it was disappointing, a few blue sparks, so that’s when he whacked in a Fray Bentos steak and kidney without taking off the lid and blew the bloody door off.

But like I say, that wasn’t a real attempt – Jed had wandered into the sitting room to stick on Midsummer Murders when the bomb went off.

But the second time around? I still have my doubts. The whole thing was just plain weird. He said the reason that the paramedics found him in her wheelchair was just that he felt a bit tired, he saw the chair, he sat down. He said the reason he was wrapped in her shawl was that he felt a bit chilly, fair enough. But…the underwear, and the false teeth?

Attempt number three involved a noble attempt at self-improvement. He joined a local foraging group. He became versed in the details of local flora and fauna, and mushrooms especially. Which ones you can safely eat. Which ones will blind you, which will kill you with a whisper, which will choke you with a song?

There’s this mushroom called Dryad’s Saddle. Absolutely one hundred percent fine for human consumption – it probably adds lustre to your hair and a shine to your eyes. He went a-foraging, he made himself a lovely risotto.

Yep, that’s right. Chucked out all the poison ones, filled this thing with nothing but Dryad’s Saddle mushrooms. The worst thing that happened? Too much salt, so he went to get himself a drink of water. He did spill some on the floor tiles, thus turning them into a slip hazard, but by the time he went back out into the kitchen it had dried and all was well.

Left the gas on? No chance. All electric.

So there are the details, angelhelpine.hev. What about I supposed to do? This guy’s a bloody incompetent, and I am bored shitless. Would it be…so bad if say, someone were to accidentally sling a length of razor wire across the stairs, or I don’t know, sneak a live hand grenade into someone’s sock drawer?

Dino loved both his jobs.

In the morning he worked as a security guard in a shopping centre. His colleagues were mainly male ex cops or servicemen.

In the afternoon he worked as a driver for a charity supporting BAME women in vulnerable circumstances, delivering food parcels and clothes. His colleagues were mostly vegan.

Dino was not one for confrontations and would smile gently and nod when one set of colleagues told him the reason his cousin had been overlooked for a civil service job was because all jobs were now being given to asylum seekers and transgender women.

He would also smile gently and nod when colleagues at the charity said that the latest traffic calming measures in the city centre represented a patriarchal approach which discriminated against women and people of colour.

Dino was quite content with his double life. He had two work bags in his car, one, an Adidas sports bag, contained a flask of tea with twelve sugars, a kit kat, a Cornish pasty to heat in the microwave and a copy of the Daily Mail. The other was a whicker affair which contained a flask of soup made of Dryad’s saddle fungus, quinoa, home grown rhubarb and kale. In this bag he also had a copy of the Guardian.

One day he placed the wrong newspaper in the wrong bags.

He noticed just in time to hide the Guardian as he unwrapped his kit Kat on morning teabreak.

Harry, his particularly loud mouthed colleague did not see anything untoward being too busy reading headlines from his own copy of the Sun out loud.

“Look at this” shouted Harry apoplectically, “Workers might be forced to undertake “Tolerance” training, former Tory MP, Quentin De Fortius, described the move by loony left councillors as “political correctness gone mad!”

“Like to see them try to get me on tolerance training!” shouted Harry bluntly before looking at his CCTV monitor and shouting “Look at those thieving Somali bastards coming out of WHSmiths!”

Dino hurried to grunt in shocked agreement but somehow the words wouldn’t come out.

He heard a tiny cough from the newspaper in his bag.

“How do you know they’ve stolen anything?” Dino found himself asking against his will.

“Look at their fucking clothes!” jeered Harry “all fucking knock off, all of them are thieving dirty bastards!” Dino paused.

“Go on” said the Guardian.

“I don’t think you should categorise people you don’t know in that way” said Dino, “Especially as you’ve no evidence they’ve committed any crimes and don’t know anything about their circumstances. In particular I wish you wouldn’t be so judgemental.”

Then, whilst Harry sat open mouthed, Dino launched into a long explanation on the history of the British Empire and Britain’s exploitation of Africa before ordering a shocked Harry to keep his opinions to himself. For the rest of the afternoon, egged on by his newspaper Dino challenged every lazy opinion his colleagues put forward.

After his colleagues had departed in shocked silence. Dino felt a surge of pride as the Guardian whispered “well done Dino!”

As he drove to his next place of work, Dino felt like a new man. Having had finally asserted himself he decided he was always going be outspoken from now on.

He entered the charity offices proudly gripping his copy of the Daily Mail..