Solemn Mass at St Bartholomew’s frequently is in competition with my youngest son’s footballing fixtures on a Sunday morning. Yet what I am able to do regularly, I find I prefer: St Bartholomew’s holds Mass in its Marian chapel on Tuesday evening.

After a critical illness, there can be a period of expansion, its impulse a starkly renewed sense of mortality. Such a time began for me in the autumn of 2022 when, without warning, I suffered a major heart attack and a few hours later underwent emergency surgery. In the year that followed, a successful recovery gave me the opportunity, against much well-meant advice, to take on more in life, though at the time I was already some distance from being inactive: I had a career as a teacher of sixth-form English literature combined with writing poetry for journals and magazines, freelance academic writing and occasional work as a book reviewer. Family life had its particular demands too: my eldest son was heading towards finals in history and my daughter was subject to the impending cruelties of the GCSE system

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