I'm middle-aged. I'm standing at the door of a new life, waving goodbye to my children. One is working as an apprentice; the other has just started university.
A friend rings. He has been thinking about Easter. What did I know about the Crucifixion and Resurrection? What did Bible stories mean to me? What had I taught my children?
Here's the bald news I gave him. I was raised an atheist. I had a lot of exposure to the Bible, because I was a huge reader, and because I was sent, involuntarily, to a Methodist boarding school for three years.
I didn't tell him that, during those three years, I went to church every Sunday, in a crocodile line of submissive girls, two by two through the park in white gloves. I had scripture lessons, sat through Sunday night homilies and Bible readings, and was sometimes caught unawares in the dormitory by an earnest, proselytising girl who had the bed next to mine. She had a beautiful heart and a determination to convert me. It never worked.
I told him I hadn't read Bible stories to my children. They had been raised as atheists. Probably what I should have said was that we raised them as sceptics, or non-believers. I have a problem with some of the harder edges of atheism.
Looking back, I think it may be a pity that I didn't leave a Bible lying about the house; that my children didn't hear those stories.
In my defence, I didn't know how to do this. The Bible had been offered to me in such an unsympathetic way that I had no interest in exposing my children to the same thing. I'd experienced it less as an offering of stories and more as a weapon in a campaign to bring me to heel.
That said, I loved Aesop's fables and fairy stories as a child, however transparent the moral. And I pored over literature from the sublime to the rubbishy, fascinated by all the windows onto the world. I was dimly aware then, and am acutely aware now, of the role that stories play in addressing the three big questions: where have we come from? why are we here? what does death mean?
I can see that my exposure to the Bible, however clumsily handled, gave me several treasured things. Firstly, a store of rich and beautiful language and evocative imagery.