What a secretive little prig I must sound, I thought. Still, as I didn’t like Gavin, I didn’t suppose it mattered much whether he liked me back. We could have a conversation without any concern for the future.

‘That’s okay,’ said Gavin mildly, chawing away on his bread. But he continued looking at me with an odd directness, like a screwball scientist who has seen something interesting suddenly develop on his agar plate.

‘Are you Protestant or Catholic?’ he asked abruptly.

So that was it. I did a mock double-take: ‘Didn’t your mother ever tell you that it was rude to bring up a man’s religion at breakfast?’

‘No, but which are you?’ he kept on, doggedly.

I was damned if I was going to tell Gavin what I was, and be slotted into some pre-prepared slot he had gleaned from the introduction to his Welcome to the Northern Ireland Troubles book.

‘I’m not telling you,’ I said.

‘Why won’t you tell me? Are you ashamed of what you are?’

All right. I took a deep breath, and got stuck in.

‘Because that’s what’s at the root of all my family problems. I desperately want to incorporate some elements of Islam into my private spiritual wardrobe, but my family are dead set against it.’

‘Are they Protestant or Catholic?’

He didn’t give up easily.

‘Neither, I’m afraid, Gavin. That’s the real difficulty. They are deeply militant atheists. They even started up a paramilitary group of their own once, in the late seventies, the Atheist Liberation Army. One of its core demands was that all citizens in Northern Ireland must publicly deny the existence of God. But unfortunately my parents were the only members of the ALA.’

‘What happened to their paramilitary group?’

‘It came under very serious, sustained attack by Republican and Loyalist paramilitaries, both of whom thought it was immoral. I remember that once my parents made themselves the target for Loyalist gunfire while attempting to hoist an atheist flag over a Free Presbyterian church.’

‘What was the flag like?’ asked Gavin. His interest, worryingly, was far outstripping my initial expectation.

‘It carried a picture of a scowling man with a long beard – the traditionalist’s representation of God – but crossed out in red, as in a no-smoking sign. Mother and Father were frankly lucky to escape with their lives on any number of occasions. The problem was, they never knew who to thank for their miraculous survival. All the other paramilitary groups had God for that, you see.’

I kept on talking, staring bleakly into my tea as though I could barely stutter out the painful memories. Gavin was soaking it all up.