It was very central to my life. I was brought up by my mother as a Roman Catholic and my stepfather was an Anglican and rather anti-Catholic. So there was a conflict here, but I’d been baptised as a Catholic and was confirmed as a member of the Church of England. And even so, I felt myself to be a Catholic. I felt intensely involved with Catholic ritual and the Latinity of it, as it was in those days, because very little was in English and everything was… everything was made, as it were, remote and graceful and beautiful by being in Latin.

And I thought, very seriously at one… for quite a number of years, that I would like, more than anything else, to be a priest. And it affected my life in a way, because at the age of 18 or so, at school, I had been having sex with anybody who came along, and... it was a very sexy school, I have to say. I don’t think it’s the same nowadays, but everybody was constantly having sex with everybody else, singly and in groups, and it… anyway, that’s an aside. At the age of 18, I said to myself: I have to stop this. If I’m ever to think seriously about being a priest, if I’m to do anything about it, then I must get this devil under control. And so I tried, and I tried very hard, and it now sounds impossible, but with the exception of one man, I had no physical sex with anybody from the age of 18 to very nearly my 28^th birthday.