Belief in God might be on the wane, but it seems angels are waxing strong. For millennia, they have appeared in scriptures and myths as an expression of our yearning to engage with invisible worlds and beings, as a way of relieving anxiety about life, and about the inevitability of death

I grew up with angels. Mostly guardian angels, who inhabited my night-time prayers, repeated from under a candlewick bedspread in my Catholic home near Liverpool, all the while gazing up at the “holy picture” of Jesus on the wall, with his copiously bleeding heart. “Angel of God, My guardian dear, To whom his love commits me here, Ever this night be at my side, To light and guard, To rule and guide. Amen.”

The place I remember angels best, though, was not in my bedroom but on the drive at the front of our house. Not that I ever saw them, but I knew they were there.

My mother had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis just before she found she was pregnant with me. By the time I could walk, she couldn’t. To which end, in the early 1970s, she took delivery of a sky-blue three-wheeler Invalid Carriage, an ugly name for an ugly Reliant-Robin-without-the-styling, provided by the British taxpayer in the first flickerings of the disability revolution.

The design allowed the driver to transfer across on to a car seat, which then slid across on rails, leaving room to haul aboard a folded-up wheelchair. But my mother’s was heavy and the manoeuvre awkward, so most of the time she didn’t bother. Her empty wheelchair stayed on the drive, while she parked outside shops where the assistants would come out and serve her through the car window.