Even when I was a campanologist, ringing the bells at our village church, I didn’t believe in God. OK, I was only a teenager, and I was only ringing the bells each Sunday as the lesser of two evils. It was that or being a choirboy. You’ll understand why I chose Plain Bob Minor.
I had a typical rural upbringing. I lived in a quiet north Essex village near Saffron Walden, went to the local Church of England primary school, my mother did the church flowers once a month to keep up with the Jones’s, and every so often we’d be dragged along to the Sunday morning service to take Holy Communion.