An Australian lady has made a plea in the letter columns asking anyone who had a happy Irish Catholic childhood in the last 60 years to please stand up - or better still, write an autobiography.
Leaving aside the pedantic point that it is easier to write in a sitting position, this plea reveals an endearing naivety, though perhaps understandable in an Australian. Because of the recent proliferation of books telling of Irish Catholic childhoods lived in the shadow of alcoholism, cruelty and poverty, this lady, who has Irish ancestry, is concerned that she has not heard any accounts of a brighter side to life in those times.
Well, I myself enjoyed the happy Irish Catholic childhood she refers to, as did thousands of others. We just don't talk about it because we still feel guilty for having enjoyed it. Yet we are happy enough to feel guilty, and just guilty enough to remain happy.
That is the essence of an ordinary Catholic childhood in Ireland, or used to be.
As it happens, some years ago I actually wrote the sort of autobiography our Australian correspondent is seeking. It was a mistake, I now realise, but I was in thrall at the time to a particularly charismatic neuropsychiatrist (a Krafft-Ebing disciple, I need hardly add), who insisted it would prove a useful therapeutic exercise. (Don't ask).
Catharsis Through Catechism is still with the publishers, who tell me, and have indeed been telling me for 17 years, that they are awaiting "a more favourable moral climate" before publication. I can understand their nervousness. A story of daily childhood recitation of the Rosary, the annual trip to Knock, the wearing of hidden scapulars, fortnightly Confession, the state of grace, First Communion, First Fridays, Novenas, the Missions, the Missionaries, altar boys, Retreats, Stations, The Word, Easter ceremonies, Easter duty, venial and mortal sin, Benediction, black babies, Confirmation, the Ten Commandments, the Children of Mary, the Eight Beatitudes, the feast of the Epiphany, the Way, the Truth and the Life, and all that old envelopment in spiritual comfort, security and guaranteed immortal life in the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church - well, clearly none of this is for the faint-hearted.
But it is very hard to explain all that to non-Irish-Catholics. And it is quite impossible to explain anything about Irish Catholicism to the English - no matter what their religion.
Take a gawk at this, for example, from a recent issue of the Independent, wherein Deborah Ross interviewed Labour politician Clare Short: "Although brought up a devout Catholic, she fell out with the religious side of it because she couldn't accept its teachings on contraception".
Right. From the point of view of an Irish Catholic, the word "devout" is superfluous; there is no religious "side" to Catholicism, a spherical concept; and giving up Catholicism because you can't accept its teachings on contraception (or anything else) is like giving up English because you can't accept its teaching on grammar.
In other words, all nonsense. And yet Ms Short "remains, she says, an ethnic Catholic, in that she feels very Catholic".
More nonsense. Please, please, spare us all the ethnic Catholics and the feely-Catholics and the ala-carte Catholics and let them accurately represent themselves as non-Catholics, lapsed Catholics, collapsed Catholics or anything that clearly and honestly indicates them as NOT BEING CATHOLICS (any bloody longer).
Oddly enough, in the course of a magnificently embittered series of articles in the Times, Libby Purves has been simultaneously telling us about the "snobbery that drove me from Catholicism". This of course is English Catholicism. But within it, Ms Purves identified the particular species that so upset her: Posh Clique Cartholicks.
These "Cartholicks" (who would rhyme Mass with farce) were apparently tremendously grand people from "old" Catholic families who among other things "liked to make it clear at every opportunity that they were absolutely not, in any way, Irish".
The cheek of them. Better than us over here, is it, with their private Masses and their supposed kinship with beatified English martyrs? And their grunting ancestors still daubing themselves with woad while our lads were out in their thousands in Africa converting the pagan hordes to the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic? I think not.
It is disappointing that Ms Purves, whose mother, as she reveals, was fond of "her Irish and plebeian roots", and didn't enjoy being stared down by the County, has been unable to rise above the irritations of "this poisonous little clique". But I look forward to reading Holy Smoke, her personal memoir about belief (from which the Times extracts were taken), to be published later this month.