When I was eleven, a school friend told me that her parents were in a cult. 

“Really?” I asked. Somehow, she was suddenly cooler. “What do they do?”

“They eat the flesh of a man and drink his blood.” 

“Wow,” I gasped in ghoulish wonder. 

“Yeah. Every week,” she said, matter-of-factly, “Every Sunday.”

“She means,” another girl elaborated with an eye roll, “they’re Christians.” The punchline deflated and irritated me. And not just because I was also a Christian. 

In my memory, the argument that followed involved us poring over a dog-eared dictionary only to find that the definition of ‘cult’ was unhelpfully vague, as applicable to an organised religion as to yoga.