A couple of months ago I was at a party in the country, staying in the room next door to a Catholic friend. As I was getting changed for dinner, I heard her through the door asking directory enquiries for the number of the local priest. Slightly alarmed, I knocked on the door to find her putting on mascara. I asked her why she felt she needed to speak with one of God’s anointed. ‘I’m booking confession for tomorrow,’ she replied, without looking away from the compact. Firstly, I was impressed that priests now took bookings. I had always thought of the sacrament as more of an open-surgery thing. When I asked her why she needed urgent shriving, she looked at me as if I were an idiot, and said, ‘I intend to have some real fun tonight. And in the morning, I intend to absolve myself.’ That response seemed to me to unite many essential Catholic characteristics – a taste for decadence, a fine moral sensibility and an extraordinary capacity to suspend rationality without ever losing sight of logic.

When I told my father and sister that I had been asked to write about my experiences as an English Catholic, they were outraged. They pointed out that I had stopped going to Church (I gave it up along with confession at eighteen), and that I claimed I didn’t believe in God (I do sometimes, but I can’t resist winding them up). My father retrieved a copy of the Catechism from his library, and we set about trying to prove who was the best English Catholic by seeing who had memorised more of the Credo, and who could do the requiem mass in Latin. I can get up to the bit where the sacred judgment arrives, but then things become a bit sketchy. Beneath all the familial bluster I think they were worried, quite legitimately, that I was going to say something on their behalf with no real right or understanding of what it meant to still practise my faith. In fact, I do lay claim to a certain universality when describing my experiences as an English Catholic, but it doesn’t have much to do with faith. I think everyone experiences their faith privately, in a dialogue between themselves and God, and whether I went to Church or not I still wouldn’t want to speak for the man kneeling beside me. I think the thing that I share with my father and sister, my odd lapses into belief aside, is the cultural experience of English Catholicism.

‘I intend to have some real fun tonight. And in the morning, I intend to absolve myself’

To understand what it means to be a left-footer, you must first recognise that Catholicism has traditionally been the religion of our foreign enemies, people actively trying to invade us, murder us or just tick us off. The Spanish sent an armada. The French gave succour to our Catholic king in exile at great personal expense, just to annoy Parliament. The Irish tried to blow us up, though as a Londoner the rise of Islamic terrorism almost makes me nostalgic for the days of the coded warning. The closest thing we have to an Independence Day involves the symbolic burning of a Catholic freedom fighter/anarchistic traitor (delete as applicable) to celebrate the foiling of his Spanish-backed coup. I remember cheerfully warming my hands in front of the bonfire at my Catholic prep school on Guy Fawkes night, blissfully unaware that one of my own forebears had been incarcerated in the Tower for alleged knowledge of the plot. He had failed to turn up to Westminster on the day the gunpowder was to have been ignited, and his excuse when he was brought before the Star Chamber was that he had stayed in the country to spend more time with his wife. Official records are sketchy, but according to family lore this prompted one of his judges to condemn him on the grounds that he had met his wife, and no one in their right mind could possibly want to spend more time with her than necessity demanded. So, since the days of the Reformation, Catholics have been the natural enemy of English sovereignty. By extension, English recusants were always viewed as a dodgy bunch. Historically, no one seemed quite sure which way the domestic Catholics would go when the chips were down.