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For many years now – twenty and a half to be cruelly accurate, I have been living on a different planet to my peers in the world of commerce. I have been under the illusion that when school stops for summer, so does work. I have read English novels, from PG Wodehouse’s Blandings books through Just William by Richmael Crompton and Rumer Godden’s Greengage Summer, not to mention a tranche of Virago authors including my heroine EM Delafied and Barbara Comyns. They all sell the myth that in the summer we head for the beach. The fact that I have often been up at dawn fitting writing in before taking my children out for a picnic or to a museum ( or nauseum as one of them called it the other day) through all the summer holidays of my life as a mother, has not stopped me thinking I am not working.

I am not sure why, and I fear it is related to getting older, but  I have begun to look at churches with deepening fascination. Just before Christmas I was in St Paul's Cathedral to hear my godson sing Evensong with the Worcester College choir. This was one of my finest moments as a godmother, sitting in the candle lit evening, absorbing the monumental space that is St Paul's, listening to the silence and the singing. My godson is a probationer and looked like a tiny candle, his face vivid, above his gown, concentration profound as he sang angelically in the choir stalls.  

Walking out afterwards, craning at the dome, the glitter of gold leaf from hundreds of feet above us was astonishing and exotic, and in its utter magnificence it reminded me of Christmas a few years previously when we were in Venice and went to the Basilica in St Mark's Square for midnight mass on Christmas Eve, and also of a service I attended at Westminster Abbey for Sir John Betjeman who has a stone of  commemoration in Poet's Corner there . These occasions stand out for me as I was lucky enough to experience these vast Cathedrals as part of the congregation rather than as a shuffling tourist.