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When I was fifteen or so I went with some fellow-pupils from my school to a meeting addressed by Billy Graham in south London. Though I did not feel at all sympathetic to his general position or style, when he asked ‘believers’ to stand up, I did so. The result was that I was segregated from my friends, and driven back separately, with a man in the back-seat of a car who kept giving me disagreeable pats on the thigh. I had apparently been converted. I acquired at that point a quite strong dislike of the very idea of being a ‘born-again’ Christian, thinking vaguely that I was already a Christian in my own way, and that this evangelist had not really made any difference to me, other than causing me to stand up in the stadium, and that I was not generally sympathetic to the idea of sudden conversion, despite the story of Saul on the road to Damascus. Maybe I already had some reservations about the role of St Paul in Christian history.