I was having a nightmare. In this nightmare, I was trying to stay friends with both parties in a painful divorce, who were now on bad terms. Representatives from each side, suspecting duplicitous behaviour on my part, had issued me with a warrant-style document legally obliging me to disclose the exact nature of my contact with the other side over the past five years.

In this audit of friendship, I was forced to detail all my affairs so that every single piece of contact, each cup of tea issued, each sympathetic incline of the head, could be listed and analysed for meaning. My computers were confiscated and telephone records were recalled so that the evidence could be pored over by lawyers.

If I had heard negative comments from one side about the other and not challenged them in any way, I could be found guilty of collusion. If I had seen one party and neglected to mention it to the other, I could be considered to have breached trust.

A would balk at any kindness shown to B and B would know if I had listened to A in distress or made soothing noises that could be construed as criticism of B.

Both would think that a “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy was unacceptable; anything short of complete disclosure at all times would be deemed a betrayal.

All I could think of were lines from that old song When You’re Smiling: “And for heaven’s sakes retain a calm demeanour/When a cop walks up and hands you a subpoena” — but that was not awfully helpful.

My lawyer in the dream arrived in a flurry of tweed and advised me to “Plead the Dashwood.”

“The Dashwood?”

“Yes, think of Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility. When doubts are raised about her behaviour in relation to one John Willoughby Esq, she says that the fact that her own conscience did not tell her that her behaviour was awry is the best guarantee that her actions were blameless. And I will say the same for you. I will say, ‘Susie is a kind person of good moral standing and if she has satisfied herself that her conduct was fair, this is all the proof any of us could desire.’”

I thought of Marianne Dashwood, whose appraisal of her own behaviour, it turns out in the book, was not correct. Her lack of caution led to embarrassment, scandal, heartbreak and despair, which morphed into illness and took her to the brink of death.

I looked at the lawyer with her “so-sue-me” open-handed stance. “Is that the best you can do?” I yelled.

There was nothing for it. I woke myself up and I did that idiotic thing that no Jane Austen heroine ever did: I plugged myself into the internet for comfort. I keyed “botanical dessert services” into an auction house website and began to search for pink-and-gold dishes, ideally with hand-painted roses. I don’t suppose anyone would judge me harshly for that.

Sadly, nothing caught my eye but eventually I stumbled upon a sale called “out of the ordinary”, which offered a pair of wavy fairground mirrors in red-painted frames. A female-dominated household can never have enough mirrors but they also create a certain tyranny. Could a fairground mirror solve this problem with a bit of humour?

Next I saw an amusement arcade “slot machine automata”, featuring a six-foot-tall painted model clown in a Pierrot costume.

“When a 20-pence coin is placed in the slot, it activates the clown,” the description said.

Although I have all my life had a love-hate relationship with amusement arcades and still feel the siren call of a fruit machine’s flashing lights every time I pass a pub or betting shop, this clown was the scariest thing I had ever seen. Until I saw the giant fibreglass spider crab, that is. There was a loud rumble in the pipes above and I jumped out of my chair. The American set of steel dentistry tooth forms that I saw next probably wouldn’t have troubled me but, coupled with the film-prop coffin lid with “distressed plaster mechanical digger scrapes”, it was alarming. When I peeped at the “petrified hollow tree trunk”, I couldn’t take it any more.

I ran back to bed before a headless suit of armour (or some such) leapt out of the screen and chased me downstairs. The relief from the nightmare was far more frightening than the actual nightmare had ever been. That was a comfort in its way.

— Financial Times