The sentence did not quite work for me. Possibly too many first person singulars, I considered. Certainly one alliterated banality. But that did not matter because it constituted a take-off, a distinct beginning. Let’s say my attention had been nudged awake if not arrested. The author of these words sat ten yards away watching me as I lowered my gaze and continued to read. His name is Brian and in a few weeks time he will confide with a chuckle that his favourite film is The Life Of Brian. Like me he is an avid cinema goer, except once I got to know him at close quarters it became apparent the moving images projected on the screen had a secondary relevance to him.

Speaking of names, you may possibly have come across mine on the end credits if you ever watched episodes of Albion Market and The Bill. I am now a part-time teacher of creative writing at a suburban adult education college. The job provides me with no more than pin money. It’s a poorly remunerated diversion while I wait for my agent to ring with news of a new assignment. After three years of silence it should perhaps have occurred to me that my television soap opera script writing career was finished but it didn’t. Hope, much like alliterated cliches, springs eternal. Brian had been attending the class for five weeks but apart from the occasional monosyllabic grunt of incomprehension had contributed nothing. Eleven mature aged students regularly turned up, eight women, two men and a non binary – all of them apart from Brian with projects very much in development. They read their stuff out, submitted to feedback and revision suggestions, argued, bantered and shared their dreams under my supervision. I enjoyed their enthusiasm. They made me feel like a midwife. I may have been barren myself but none of them chose to notice, radiantly pregnant with ideas and implicitly trusting me to facilitate the safe deliveries of their babies into the world.

So at the end of the fifth session I engaged Brian in a brief heart to heart. He preempted my first question by apologising that he had so far failed to put pen to paper. “It’s not that I have nothing I want to write about,” he privately admitted. “It’s more that I feel disabled by self-consciousness every time I try. I worry that my words won’t make sense, the grammar will be mangled. I imagine the muffled sniggers in the room when I have to read it out. I’ll become the class buffoon, the outsider.”

“But you’ve already positioned yourself as an outsider, Brian,” I pointed out, “by virtue of the fact you’re non productive.”

“That’s a fair point,” he conceded. “If you think I’m just freeloading I’ll sling my hook, no problem.”

“Not at all,” I hastened to reassure him. “You say you have a subject you want to write about and that fully qualifies your presence. Do you mind me asking what it is?”

“Me,” he said. To which I encouraged him to elaborate. “I urgently feel the need to take stock. To explain who I am. Both to myself as well as others. But that’s the other problem. If I’m absolutely truthful, which is what I want to be, you may all be shocked. Or maybe plain disgusted. Not you personally so much maybe? But the others. They’re all such nice polite middle-class people.” I could not help but laugh at this. “See! You’re mocking me,” he pounced with exaggerated sensitivity. “You’re not taking me seriously.”

“I absolutely am,” I retorted. “It’s just that you made it sound as if you excluded me as a nice, polite middle-class person, that’s all! Maybe I’ll take that as a compliment!” Brian’s boyishly winsome face instantly relaxed. “I suggest we proceed like this,” I continued. “You try your best to write something for next week. I’ll read it and if I feel the content is in some way inappropriate or unshareable we’ll keep it outside the circle, just between the two of us.”

“But you’d still coach me?” he asked a bit pathetically.. “Help me to improve and develop it?”

I reassured him and gave him a few tips. I told him to relax, allow his subconscious to take over the act of composition, to refuse to listen to the constantly whispering voice of self-censorship, to use language sparely, and to try to concoct a riveting opening sentence – one that instantly ignites the reader’s curiosity. So the following week I was most gratified when he arrived early and handed me a stapled document. You have read the first sentence. Here is how it continued:

Her name must not concern you. Even to write it down after all these years will send incapacitating bolts of pain through my body. We were together for two and a half years. In fractional terms that equates to one fourteenth of my life almost exactly. Not very much then, the idle mind might ponder. But you don’t need to be a particle physicist to understand that time is a wondrously bizarre dimension in which the human psyche finds its ephemeral home. Time can gallop at a reckless speed. Equally it can stand virtually statuesque still. If a breathtaking velocity of bliss characterised our relationship then a sterile torpor of inertia its absence. I had lost the will to continue with life but lacked the courage to end it. This is a matter of abject disgrace which eats away at me on my aimless nomadic journey ever since.

Heavy stuff indeed, I found myself thinking, and I involuntarily glanced up in the direction of its hapless author, expecting to meet his eyes. But he had turned in his chair towards a fellow student who must have just arrived. They both laughed as if sharing a joke, the gist of which I vaguely heard. The story advanced like this:

It is a truth not generally understood that even a phantom has physical needs, however wretched its plight. Hunger, thirst, sex came high up on the list. It occurred to me that I might be unemployable yet this proved not to be the case. Nobody noticed the stigma that grief had branded onto my soul or the stench of despair emanating from my pores. I would find work, slog away for a few months then move on to some other menial job, unable to sustain interest. Every activity I tried my hand at smacked of absurdity, just displacing the vast ocean of time that had become available to me rather than rendering it meaningful. I experienced the world as if through a high powered magnifying glass, hideously distorted and in slow motion. Why nobody seemed to call me out as a freak I cannot say. Perhaps some people noticed but chose not to speak? Then one day my freakishness did get caught out. A woman who worked in the same open plan office as me said, “Why do you keep looking at me like that?”

“I suppose because you are so beautiful,” I replied straight. She scrutinised me as if waiting for more or not quite sure of my sincerity. Long seconds passed before I heard my vocal chords again. “I’d like to take you out somewhere.”

“Oh, where?” she asked.

“There’s a film at the Odeon I’d thought of going to see,” I said. “Afterwards we could have supper somewhere.”

I half expected her to laugh at me, to tell me her husband wouldn’t like it, that she didn’t go on dates with unsavoury nobodies who reeked of body odour – or whatever else. I expected rejection. Why shouldn’t I? I’d long since rejected myself. It didn’t matter. This conversation served only to displace a brief interval in the interminable tedium of the day.

“Okay then. Friday evening would work well for me,” she smiled and simultaneously gestured across the room to where the office manager stood frowning in such a peevish, schoolmistressy way I wanted to laugh out loud. Maybe I did? The petty machinations of bosses as they exercise power over their staff had always amused me long before I became hollowed out by grief. But now as a phantom discretion had ceased to matter. I didn’t care. I could throw caution to the wind. When I looked again at the beautiful woman – whose name was eventually disclosed as Sami after we had finished pleasuring each other on the back row of the stalls – she had resumed typing, her attention wholly engaged by the computer screen.

I liked Sami. She had a kind heart but it quickly became clear I fell well short of her expectations and she dumped me. Judging by her parting shot there may have been more of a tinge of bitterness involved. “Don’t even look at me again, you self-pitying pervert,” she warned. Fortunately I had already handed in my notice. Office cultures are oppressive enough. It was beyond the right time to move on. However, I had at least learnt an important lesson from my fling with Sami, namely how very easy it is for two people to misunderstand each other’s motives. As we had left the cinema foyer after our penultimate date she had said, “Why do we always have to do it in the cinema? I think you’re in this just for fun. Doesn’t it occur to you that I might want love and a relationship?”

The three neatly handwritten pages had been signed off with a cautionary prompt – TO BE CONTINUED. By the time I’d finished reading them the class had all but assembled. Just then the door fell open for a final time and in came shuffling the grandfather of the group, as I’d come to think of him, an affable senior citizen who asked us to call him by the soubriquet, Mayo. He blustered an apology about his bus being late and took a seat. My tendency is to structure the lesson in four main segments as follows: 30 minutes of teacher input, usually comprising a ‘How the pros go about it’ topic, followed by discussion. 40 minutes of sharing new work, followed by feedback after each reading. 30 minutes teacher-student one to one private assessment and coaching. 10 minute summation and forward planning. On this particular occasion I had prepared a talk about the Gothic aesthetic. I mentioned the likes of Mary Shelley and Edgar Allan Poe amongst others and asked the group why horrifying and macabre events still interested us today. Mayo said it was probably about our relationship to the unknown. The only thing we really know is that we don’t actually know very much at all, despite the collective pretence otherwise. Science, Mayo reflected, likes to believe it’s blown away all the myths and superstitious nonsense that preceded it. However along the way it’s opened up a Pandora’s box of mind-boggling paradoxes and destructive capability. 

When it came to the one to one coaching part of the lesson I decided to see Claire first, she who Brian had been bantering with while I read his confessional story. Claire is an unapologetic monarchist. Her project consists of a very long letter to the heir to the British throne advising him how to rule his subjects. I cannot compare it to anything I’ve come across before. It advances at about ten extremely condensed sentences each week. “The letter must be exemplary in its clarity,” she told me when I questioned the tortoise-like speed of her output. “The demands on Charles’ attention are enormous. He must receive sack loads of mail from bigots and illiterates.” This week the ten sentences focussed on the public housing and the multiple large properties owned by the Crown. This text does not concern us here. In due course I got round to asking her what was really on my mind. “You and Brian seemed to be sharing a joke earlier on,” I asked. “Do you mind telling me what it was about?”

“He invited me to go to the pictures with him,” she explained in a conspiratorial whisper. “I said, what, as friends? Platonic like? And he said, certainly as friends but more priapic like. I thought I must have misheard. You’re a dark horse, I said. More of a dark manwhore, he replied. I’ll need to think your proposition over, I said. I’m quite a conservative person. That’s a happy coincidence, he replied. So am I. More a brief encounter type of film goer than a fifty shades of grey….. What do you make of all that?”

“Extremely saucy is the phrase that springs to mind,” I considered.

“Exactly,” agreed Claire, “And him being a clergyman too.”

“Are you sure about that?” I asked in astonishment. “He doesn’t wear the dog collar thing.”

“Positive. I’ve seen him in All Souls Church,” she said. “He’s a curate there. But on the plus side he did tell me he thought it a moral duty to explain his motives.”

It did occur to me, however, that Claire might have a justifiable complaint of harassment upheld if she chose to make one but her demeanour, bordering on surprised delight, indicated otherwise. So when Brian’s turn for a private conflab came round I decided to keep her revelations to myself. “Tell me honestly what you think of my writing,” he said. I answered truthfully that I thought the narrator was an extremely damaged person. He nodded in agreement and asked, “Did you sympathise with him or just feel repelled?”

“The jury’s still out on that one,” I reflected. “But you’ve aroused my curiosity. I don’t know if you’ve read any Kafka? Well, your protagonist – “

“Me,” he interrupted.

“Yes, well your me is reminiscent of Gregor in Metamorphosis,” I continued. Brian appeared content with those brief comments. He stood up muttering a thank you and returned to his seat.

I thought some more about this comparison later. In his novel Kafka merely informs us that Gregor was surprised one morning to wake up and find he had turned into an insect. What kind of insect is not clear. Most readers have concluded, however, it is most likely a cockroach. Brian seemed to me much more like a spider than a roach, cunningly spinning a web to trap whatever innocent female fly happened into the vicinity. Had I been identified as a potential victim? This question did not cause me any anxiety but I resolved to keep my guard up.

The following week I began the session with a talk as usual. It centred on the strange compulsive habit so many human beings have become addicted to – scribbling words on paper. “Take for instance one famous author’s opinion about this,” I said. “Namely, ‘it is in our writing that we shed our illnesses’.” I referenced a few popular books to illustrate the idea and to my delight quite a lively discussion ensued. The most thoughtful contribution came from the student called Chance who identifies neither as male or female. They have a project provisionally entitled The Uses And Abuses Of Reason. It ranges so far over a wide landscape of moral and social issues of which gender dysphoria is but one. Chapter one finds Chance as a young woman on the cusp of university entry being suddenly abducted by aliens who whisk her off in their spacecraft. It is fairly standard stuff one has come across before involving large heads, bulimic bodies and rigorous anatomical investigation but when the aliens, who are gentle and speak perfect English, finally release her a week later Chance finds that their previous sense of having a female identity has not returned to planet Earth with them. What happened to it? Did the aliens somehow extract it from Chance’s psyche? Is Chance ill? The days pass and they are none the wiser. It cannot be an illness because Chance feels physically enhanced and bursting with energy. Before the abduction they had been depressed and fatigued. Their older brother had been imprisoned for murdering a woman and the family were distraught. Now Chance experiences acceptance and peace of mind. So for Chance writing is like being transported by benevolent extraterrestrials to another dimension of reality and having whatever toxins have accumulated in their mind body extracted during the journey. It is therapeutic and cleansing.

Incidentally Brian contributed not a single word during the discussion. Occasionally when I glanced at him, he struck me as alert and utterly attentive, spidery patience personified. Here then is how his own writing project continued:

“The word fun is a euphemism, a typically female one in my opinion. Men would never use it to describe that most visceral of all animal impulses. But the words love and relationship are of a different order. They may mean different things to different people but they are the pillars on which the roof of all civilisations are perched. For better or worse we take shelter under these concepts. I say that because I knew Sami was correct in her judgement.  Unfair to call me a pervert perhaps but certainly uncivilised. Yet I found it impossible to alter my behaviour. A lot of women found me attractive and I took advantage of them. A few may have felt they were taking advantage of me. I always paid up for tickets, taxis, and flowers. When it came to the deed, however, I always used cinemas, the back seats of cars, grassy meadows etc. For me peripatetic sex was more exciting and therefore more blissful than its domestically staged equivalent. I associated bedrooms and living rooms with intimacy and romance and I could not tolerate that. 

Such arrangements suited some of my girlfriends better than others. Every hook up is an experiment, isn’t it? That is the unspoken deal. If physical attraction exists between a couple they literally over time grope their way into a form of understanding, superficial and pragmatic though it will necessarily be. I always tried to be honest about the perfunctory nature of my needs and to accept rejection when it came, as nearly always it did. 

But now I reflect on the matter, ‘tried to be honest’ is a wholly inadequate phrase. The truth is I didn’t try anything like hard enough. I only answered questions about my past in the vaguest terms. I didn’t draw attention to my ongoing sense of desolation and purposelessness. Why should I? Eventually it got to the ridiculous stage where I managed to convince myself that the entire human race, underneath the camouflage of witty sociable interaction, must all be in the same state of existential crisis as myself. The turning point did arrive however and it happened like this.

Joy was her moniker. As in name, so in nature. She sussed me out much quicker than most. I knew the heave-ho was coming but it still surprised me. “It’s time to go our separate ways. Certain incompatibilities have arisen,” she announced in a cheerful no nonsense way one evening. “Let’s say you live at the bottom of a deep black hole whereas I live openly in the sunshine. I live in the now while you live in the yesterday. No, don’t argue. I could try to pull you out of the hole but I lack the skill and strength. But I do know someone who doesn’t. Would you permit me to ask Martin to give you a call? I feel a sort of duty of care towards you.”

No previous girlfriend had ever spoken to me quite so forthrightly, patronising maybe but devoid of both bitterness and irony. The call came through the very next day. An immediately warm avuncular voice and after the preliminaries it invited me for a beer at his home, 23 Orchard Road. It turned out to be a vicarage and the grey-haired bloke who opened the door wore a dog collar. What the hell had I let myself in for? I was going to be evangelised! Martin led me into a kitchen where we picked up cans of craft ale then into a parlour stuffed to the gills with religious icons and books. “Joy tells me you’re not a god-botherer,” he said as we settled into deeply upholstered ancient sofas, “but you haven’t quite closed the door either?” I nodded and told him I’d once studied all the available arguments for and against the existence of God and concluded neither philosophy nor mystical testimony proved an unequivocal case either way.

“That’s something we have in common then,” he smiled and asked me what I thought of the beer. No question it tasted smooth and delicious. Martin then told me his father had been a puritanical teetotaller who wouldn’t even allow alcohol in the house, never mind drink it. He’d been brought up on a council estate riddled with wife beating, good for nothing drunks. “Just think of the pleasure he missed!” Martin smiled and I instantly sensed a Thought For Today segue about to strike and I wasn’t wrong. It went something like this. The dogmatic and despotic history of the church has made belief in God very difficult for modern rational humankind but atheism is not a satisfactory alternative. “It merely replaces one dogma, one certainty, with another. The real question we should be asking is this. Does belief in God make us more emotionally healthy and resilient? The answer is yes if we imbibe sensibly of God by which I mean – “

Of course I wasn’t prepared to let him get away with that. I Interrupted the sermon and trotted out the standard British Humanist Association objections, no need to rehearse them here, is there? And he fully agreed that there was much really bad or plainly naive God worship which needed to be eradicated but he insisted the baby should not be chucked out with the filthy bathwater. He talked about the health-giving qualities of positive visualisation and placebos and cited scientific studies to show that they had higher success rates than was generally acknowledged. The mind was an immensely powerful faculty, he argued, and when focussed properly could eradicate disease and promote well-being and blissful happiness.  “Even if it turns out in some future epoch that the universe is not presided over by a benevolent creator in the way some religions characterise Him,” he argued, “we shall have served humanity’s and the planet’s needs far better by tapping into a supreme source of bliss.”

By the time our conversation ended eight bottles of ale had been consumed and, almost certainly as a consequence, I had agreed to attend a beginner’s god-bothering course that Martin’s church pioneered. It would involve a free dinner and more craft beer! So to cut a long story short, under Martin’s tuition I learnt how to pray (“just another word for positive visualisation”), to become transported by sacred music and become buoyed up by the charismatic energy of the congregation. I cannot say definitely it was better than sex but the ecstatic experiences lasted longer and accumulated in their intensity as the months passed. Within a year the need for spiritual bliss had somewhat displaced the need for its vulgar carnal equivalent but not entirely. Martin pronounced that I’d been permanently extricated from my black hole. It was not really true but I saw no value in disabusing the good man, especially when he added that he needed another reliable assistant working on the premises and put me into a fast track training course for the ministry. The church provided the economic support I required. “The demons have finally been exorcised,” the vicar proclaimed.  “The phantom has become flesh. Alleluya!” TO BE FURTHER CONTINUED.

Due to an interruption by the college janitor about some maintenance issue I didn’t have sufficient time to fit Brian into my one to ones. He looked slightly miffed when I told him to stay behind at the end of the class. Nonetheless he acquiesced.  “So how do you think my writing is developing?” he asked a bit impatiently. 

“The story takes an interesting turn,” I replied.

“It isn’t a story,” he objected. “It’s my life.” I apologised for the slip of the tongue and simultaneously noticed Claire hanging around nearby, apparently eavesdropping. “Did you find my conversion experience convincing?” he added. 

“Yes I did on the whole,” I reflected. “These charismatic churches can certainly kick up a sandstorm. Why don’t you sit down? I’d like to ask you something about your character Martin.” 

He glanced at his watch then towards Claire. “I’m sorry. I haven’t got time right now,” he said. “We’re already running late for the last screening. See you next week.”

You could have knocked me down with a feather. “Have fun!” I said directly to Claire who blushed before turning on her heels.

The following week both of them failed to turn up. Maybe they were playing hooky and had gone to the cinema again, I found myself thinking resentfully. I gave a little talk about characterisation and storytelling, how a good novelist will actually pay serious attention to the people who exist in his imagination and often change the direction the story is going in if they demand it firmly enough. “An author may obviously preconceive a narrative direction and ending but should never slavishly prosecute it,” I told them. “The buried motives of his characters may only gradually become known to him.” Mayo asked a good question about how these characters get into the imagination. Chance asked an even better one, namely, “What is the imagination?” Someone else quoted “the lunatic the lover and the poet” speech from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Then Francesca, who is writing a book about Italian olive oil, told Chance rather sarcastically that imagination was the faculty they had been using when the extraterrestrials took them off in a spacecraft. Chance laughed and retorted, “If I had a tenner for every time I’ve been accused of being a crazy fantasist, I’d be able to buy my own olive tree orchard in Tuscany!”

When Brian also failed to show up the week after that I reluctantly assumed he had thrown in the towel. Rude of him not to send a message though, I considered, but – what the hell – we still had a quorum. And Claire did put in an appearance, breathlessly apologising that the previous week she’d gone down with a heavy cold. Once we got into the individual tuition part of the lesson I probed her about Brian. “Let’s just say one visit to the flicks with him was more than enough,” she confided. “And no, I doubt he’ll return. He came to this course scouting for talent. He had the gall to tell me. And there’s nobody else in here on his hit list – apart from you, I mean.” I did my best to hide my surprise from her. But was it actually a surprise? Some corner of my mind prompted me otherwise. And there’s me reading the runes to them about buried motives!

As I was leaving the building that evening the night porter approached me with a large brown envelope. “Some bloke dropped this off for you earlier on in the day,” he said. I tore it open and found a brief apologetic message from Brian stapled to the third and final section of his story. Many apologies. Thursday evenings are now out for me. It’s the church home group night and the vicar has given me the onerous task of monitoring their progress. However I did finish my piece and would value your opinion. Maybe we can have a chat over lunch? Brian. 

A phone number was attached. Here’s how his story concluded:

Spiritual bliss is a very difficult thing to describe to someone who has not experienced it. The same must, of course, be true of sexual bliss. I once read in a young people’s guide to the body an orgasm described as being like a huge sneeze. So much for the inadequacy of language to convey human feelings! The best I can manage to say is almost equally banal, that the mind has to be involved as well as the body so far as any form of bliss is concerned. An object of gratitude or adoration has to be formulated first in the mind. This may not initially be the trigger but at some point in the process it will seem to become so. For many of my congregation that trigger would be Jesus. However for me Jesus never really worked. When I eventually confided this to Martin, he put me at ease. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “There are multiple ways to attain a state of spiritual ecstasy.” I didn’t know it then but he was very much on the liberal progressive wing of what I have since sadly learnt is an extremely broad church movement with many quite repulsive reactionaries at the other end of the faith spectrum. 

Martin’s view was that you extracted from Christianity the bits that made personal sense to you. There was no need to pretend to buy into the whole vast package – history, literature, theology – much of which was open to interpretation and always had been. “Everything ever written is open to interpretation,” Martin used to say, “so I cannot understand why any religious movement should be excluded from that.” This is one of the reasons we got on so well in addition to the fact we both liked a beer and believed alcohol assisted us in the journey towards reaching a spiritually blissful state. “If you read the non-canonical Thomas Gospel,” Martin told me, “the author describes a Jesus who helped his followers achieve this state by taking a herbal stimulant. We don’t actually know what it was. My best guess is peyote or magic mushrooms. It is clear in the gospel that Jesus did this to loosen and finally dissolve their rigidly conditioned notion of reality. In doing this they developed access to the non material world. They perceived that reality, once they learnt how to remove the filters of education from their eyes, had a fluid spiritual quality to it, a luminous energy that emanated from the creative source, from God if you prefer that term.”

I think this is one reason why children were so important to Jesus. We are born into the world with this spiritual sensitivity but the socialisation process knocks it out of us. We are taught to intellectualise everything, to think the world into being rather than just feel it. So for me Christianity became a way of returning to my childhood, communing with nature and escaping from the mind forged manacles of my education. Every moment can seem blissful if you experience it mindlessly, can’t it? So this was how my life became regenerated. Then a year after I had become a curate under Martin’s enlightened guidance he announced his retirement. A new vicar took over, young but very much an old school zealot and authoritarian who laid down the Christian law by rote and expected everyone to inflexibly follow it. The anarchist, rule breaking lover of transcendent sensual life that I understood Jesus to be would have loathed this man and his homophobic and misogynistic attitudes. I rapidly became disillusioned and the bliss went out of my job. I saw the church for the hell hole of contradictions and pratfalls it really was and the emptiness returned to my life. END.

I felt my heart give a little jerk at the abruptness of the ending. However ambivalent my feelings about Brian remained, he clearly did not lack intelligence and I was sad to learn how his life had for a second time become clouded by despair. I had misjudged his application. It could not have been easy for him to write such a confession of inadequacy and I prided myself somewhat at being the catalyst. I rang him up to congratulate him on seeing the project through and we arranged to meet for lunch on a midweek day in a high street bistro. “Sorry about this,” he smiled pointing at the dog collar he was wearing. “I’ve come straight from the God factory.”

“If the church job has become as awful as you say, why don’t you just leave?” I asked him.

“That’s what I’ve now decided to do,” he replied. “In fact it’s only while I’ve been writing this piece for you that the truth dawned on me. You see, I’d been kidding myself that I could stay at All Souls as a fifth columnist, secretly flying the liberal flag, organising a congregational rebellion – isn’t that what Jesus would have done faced with the philistine self-righteous certitude of our vicar? But the hard truth is the congregation are like sheep blindly following the new fascist shepherd. They’re too deferential to rock the boat. If he says that homosexuality is sinful and quotes Deuteronomy to prove it he must be right. He’s a Phd in Divinity with a glowing reference from the archbishop of Canterbury no less. And so it goes. Practically everything to the Reverend Travis Hogg is either original sin or conditioned sin and our Christian duty is to confess it all diligently each and every day. That’s how we earn God’s love. That’s how we come to experience sacred bliss, in the aftermath of extensive periods of guilt and self-flagellation.” He sighed and shook his head.  “Don’t you think original sin is one of the most stupid ideas ever invented?” he asked me.

I nodded and said, “Many would say the same thing about God.”

This amused him. “And you can’t really blame them,” he agreed. “It’s the anthropomorphic stuff that does the damage. The patriarchal vindictive persona inherited from Hebrew history. My reading of the gospels is that Jesus tried to revise that but the nonsense persists.” Did this mean that Brian didn’t actually believe in God? “Of course I don’t subscribe to the Nobodaddy deity but I agree with Einstein that it seems unlikely that an environment as beautiful and complex as the one we enjoy could just come about wholly by evolutionary accident,” he said. “I think there has to be a creative intelligence at the core of this place we call the universe. Never mind think it. I feel it, intuit it, an energy and a presence that is all pervasive, that lurks just out of sight of reason and science. At some future date I’m sure we will develop a new type of science that can identify this life force in the same way traditional science has previously identified gravity and electromagnetism.”

It turned out to be a very decent lunch and the conversation, which I radically precis here, never lagged. While I visited the ladies room he picked up the tab and refused to take any contribution. “The afternoon’s mine to fritter away as I please,” he announced. “So I’m going to catch a matinee at the Odeon. It’s about a woman orchestral conductor called Lydia Tar. Have you seen it?” As it happened I had not but my interest was piqued and so it became the first of many weekly films we watched at that most comfortable and discreet of venues.

Eight months later almost to the day, Brian rang obviously in a state of high excitement. “Hi there, Clapton. (that’s his pet name for me) You’ll never guess what’s happened!” he said. “I’ve been offered that vicar’s job in the sticks! Third choice actually. The first two turned it down. I trust you’re happy for me?” It sounded more like an order than a question so I told him what he wanted to hear. “The village has been without a vicar for over a year,” he explained, “and they want me asap. I’ve spoken to the Hogg and he’s prepared to let me go without working my notice.”

In the event we decided on one last visit to the cinema followed by a champagne supper in the Italian bistro as an appropriate way to say goodbye. When he finally came the groans of ecstasy resounded far louder than any time before and I used my free hand to muffle his mouth with a handkerchief as best I could. Even so, the hostile stares that greeted us when the lights went up made me feel relieved that this ritual of mutual comfort would never again be repeated. “Once I’ve settled in you must come and visit,” he urged me and though I didn’t say as much I knew that I never would. The Welsh borders are a considerable trek away and besides I am what most people would describe as happily married with three demanding young children to care for.

We have kept in touch by exchanging Christmas cards. I get the impression the locals love his style of worship and he has quickly grown the congregation. Then one day out of the blue I received a longer letter that contained a wedding invitation. “I don’t know how it happened but I have fallen in love again,” he wrote. “She is a farmer’s daughter, widowed and mother of two beautiful daughters.. We are on exactly the same spiritual wave length, it seems. I no longer fear psychological intimacy and commitment. Something about the rural air and way of life has had a transformative effect on me……….But I know I couldn’t have got to this place of serenity without your help. You encouraged and supported me when I had become hopelessly lost again.” It went on in this vain yet, while appreciating Brian’s expression of gratitude, I knew in my heart of hearts that I was hardly deserving.

A long scheduled family holiday abroad prevented me from attending the ceremony but I sent my warmest congratulations to the happy couple while enclosing these reflections as a wedding gift. Perhaps they will serve him as a “Look, I came through!’ momento or he may choose to share them eventually with his children as a learning experience or he may simply throw them away. Who knows? Certainly I myself must have learnt something by putting pen to paper after all this time, albeit at the moment I am not exactly sure what.