Last week I did something a bit unusual for me. I went to Glasgow to attend an evening event, organised by The Tablet. In the rather stunning space of the University Memorial Chapel, three writers, Tina Beattie, who has recently published The Good Priest – a thriller – and whose non-fictional writing is well known to Tablet readers, Mark Dowd, another Tablet regular and the author of Queer and Catholic, an autobiography, and David Jasper, emeritus professor of Religion and Literature, discussed “Confessions and Contradictions: What does Catholic writing mean today?”

I went partly to hear writers whose work I have admired, but mainly perhaps because I have an embedded interest in the question: and not just embedded, personal. Here were three people happy to be described as “Catholic writers” – and although I am both a Catholic and a writer I am not sure that I would call myself a Catholic writer, or want to be called one by others. Or not all the time. Or something like that. I am a Catholic writer as I type this column; sometimes elsewhere I write “about” Catholic (or more broadly Christian) subjects and sometimes I write about totally different things.