What would Judas do?

My Facebook pals have been posting a lot of those Buzzfeed personality quizzes lately. You know the ones: "Which Harry Potter character are you?" "Which Downton Abbey character are you?" "Which Beatle are you?" There are scores of them, perhaps hundreds.

This morning, a friend posted one called "Which of Jesus' disciples are you?"  Well, her husband is a Baptist minister, after all.

It is, like all the other quizzes, highly unscientific and rather random. But I took it anyway. Elder daughter had just come downstairs during a break in the highly touted gold medal game between the Canadian and Swedish hockey teams on the final day of the Sochi Winter Olympics which I've succeeded in ignoring almost completely this year.

The quiz results had informed me that I was Saint John, so I read out the profile and watched in bewilderment as elder daughter and the Resident Fan Boy hooted in hilarity.  While it's true that the paragraph ended with my comparison to a Golden Retriever puppy, I noted uneasily that their laughter had begun much earlier, with my description as being "kind and loving".

Actually, I was rather hurt.

However, the day was there to be got on with.  Canada won the hockey game.  (Rah-rah.)  There was a free access weekend at Ancestry.co.uk, and after a couple of hours of downloading records and doing laundry, I saw elder daughter's results on my Facebook wall.  She had come out at Judas Iscariot.  Not far above it, her updated status read:  "Hurt and disappointed."

I thought that was rather an extreme response to a silly quiz, and went upstairs to investigate, where I discovered it was, in fact, to do with an ongoing controversy at her university.  She is co-editor-in-chief of the magazine, and someone on the council had published an inflammatory criticism of the editors' decision to publish a letter -- which had been a public letter and which they had permission to publish.  On top of this, the person in question was someone who she considered a friend and who had not said a word to her on the matter for two weeks.  He's in second year, so I guess sophomoric behaviour is not such a great surprise.

I waited a little while before approaching her again.  In the meantime, she got supportive texts and Skype visits from Halifax.

I climbed the stairs and paused in her doorway.

"I just wondered if I should come with you to Halifax this evening.  Y'know, just so I can beat the stuffing out of this fellow.  No, I'll do it in a kind and loving way, rather in the style of a Golden Retriever puppy, which, as you know, I resemble just as much as you do Judas Iscariot…."

To my relief, she laughed.