Eventually I manage to convince Molly that we are Church of England, although this line of argument is not without its horrifying moments either, and the two of us cruise the neighbourhood in the car, looking for the right church putting on the right show at the right time. We strike it lucky almost immediately: Molly spots a few ancient parishioners hobbling into St Stephen’s, a couple of streets away, and we park the car right outside. (If you are the kind of person whose choice of entertainment is governed by ease of parking, then I thoroughly recommend Anglican Sunday services. You can arrive at five to ten for a ten o’clock service, and you’re away by two minutes past eleven. Anyone who’s had to wait for an hour in the Wembley car park after a Spice Girls concert may find this attractive.)

It has everything I want. The vicar is indeed a kindly middle-aged lady who seems vaguely ashamed of her beliefs; the sparsity of the congregation, and its apparent lack of interest in anything or anyone, allows us to sit towards the back and pretend that we’re nothing to do with anything or anybody. Molly is of course the youngest person in the pews on this side of the church, but I am probably the second youngest, by ten or fifteen years, although with a couple of them it’s hard to tell: time has not, it is fair to say, been kind to some of these people. God knows what is cause and what is effect here.

We sing a hymn, ‘Glorious Things of Thee are Spoken’—an easy one, easy-peasy, clearly remembered from school assemblies and assorted weddings, and both Molly and I join in with both energy and expertise, even if we do say so ourselves; and then there is a reading, and then there are notices. They’re having a bring-and-buy sale. The reason there is no choir this week is that it has been invited to join forces with another choir to do something else somewhere else… I start to drift off. I have never been to an ordinary church service before. I have been to weddings, funerals, christenings, carol services and even harvest festivals, but I have never been to a bog-standard, nobody-there Sunday service.

It all feels a long way from God—no nearer than the bring-and-buy sale would be, and much further away than I imagine Molly’s friend Pauline is at this precise moment. It feels sad, exhausted, defeated; this may have been God’s house once, you want to tell the handful of people here, but He’s clearly moved, shut up shop, gone to a place where there’s more of a demand for that sort of thing. And then you look around and wonder whether the sadness isn’t part of the point: those who are able to drag themselves here once a week are clearly not social church-goers, because there is nothing social happening here. This isn’t a place to see and be seen, unless opera glasses are placed on the backs of the pews. You’d have to walk twenty yards to shake somebody’s hand. No, these people are the hardcore, the last WASPs in Holloway, the beaten and the lonely and the bereaved, and if there is a place for them in the Kingdom of Heaven, they deserve it. I just hope that it’s warmer there than here, and there is more hope, and youth, and there is no need for bring-and-buy sales, and the choir of angels isn’t singing elsewhere that day, but you rather fear it might be; C of E heaven is in all probability a quarter-full of unhappy old ladies selling misshapen rock cakes and scratched Mantovani records. Every day of the week, for all eternity. And what about the nice lady reading the notices to us? Is she ever dispirited by her hobbling, careworn flock? I thought that I could detect a touch of weariness, maybe even despair, during the appeal for flower-arrangers, but maybe this is because flower-arranging is not her thing.

Sermons, however, clearly are her thing—electrifyingly, embarrassingly, hilariously so. She takes a deep breath, fixes us with a stare, and then shouts ‘1–2–3–4 GET WITH THE WICKED!’, and we shrink back into our pews, afraid and confused—all of us apart from Molly, who recognizes the reference. ‘1–2–3–4 Get With the Wicked’ is her favourite song in the charts at the moment—she bought it last Saturday afternoon with her pocket money, in Holloway Road, and she spent the afternoon dancing to it. The rest of the congregation, however, the varicose women and emphysemic men who constitute the nice lady’s flock… I would wager that none of them have, as yet, bought the CD, so they do not know why the nice lady is shouting these things at them, and those who are physically capable of doing so stare hard at their shoes.

The nice lady pauses and smiles. ‘Is that what Jesus wanted, for us to “get with the wicked”?’ she asks. ‘I think it is.’ She points at us, suddenly and theatrically, as if she had a microphone in the other hand. ‘Think about it.’ Her invitation is welcome, because it means that we can continue to look at our shoes for a while longer as we struggle to tease out all the theological implications of the lyric. Who on earth does she think she is talking to? I can only presume she is literally looking at a different audience, that she has entered a parallel universe full of young, trendy Christians who wouldn’t miss her sermons for the world and whoop with joy at each reference she makes to their culture. I want to run up to the pulpit and shake her.

‘Think about it,’ she says again. ‘Mary Magdalene. Judas Iscariot. Zaccheus the tax collector. The woman at the well. One, two, three, four! That was Jesus getting with the wicked!’ Suddenly, though, she switches her line of thought, and, with a grinding change of gears that would make even the most hopeless learner driver wince, she wonders whether God wants us to get with the good as much as He wants us to get with the wicked. She suspects not. She suspects that He wants us merely to be ourselves, and that if we spend all our time being falsely pious, then He won’t be able to get to know us, which is what He wants to do.

Suddenly she starts singing ‘Getting to Know You’ from The King and I. I am blushing now. I can feel the blood pumping through every vein in my face and neck, and for the first time I wonder whether the nice lady is actually demented. It is only fair to point out, however, that not everyone is as agonized as I am by the performance. Some of us are waggling our heads and smiling, and it is clear that The King and I is closer to our collective heart than ‘Get With the Wicked’.

‘This is a good church, isn’t it, Mum?’ Molly whispers, and I nod with as much enthusiasm as I can access.

‘Is this the one we’ll be coming to every week?’

I shrug. Who knows? It is not easy to see how I might become a committed Christian through listening to a madwoman singing selections from musicals at me, but then again, I never really anticipated sharing my house with men called names like GoodNews and Monkey.

‘I know that song is from The King and I,’ says the nice lady, ‘but it could have been written about God. He wants to get to know you. And that’s why He is not interested in you being artificially good, because that prevents Him from discovering you.’

Ha. This is more like it. ‘Artificially good’. I like that phrase, and I will throw it in somebody’s face at the first available opportunity. This is why I have moved out: because of the artificiality of David’s behaviour, which prevents God from knowing him. In fact, David may well end up going to hell, paradoxically and ironically, because God will not have a clue who he really is. I am coming round to the Christian viewpoint. The nice lady is arguing that doing nothing—and anyway, I don’t do nothing, because I am a doctor, a good person, but my goodness is organic and natural, rather than artificial—is better, more holy, than doing something. I decide, on the spot, to let God into my heart, in the hope that my new-found faith can somehow be used as a vicious weapon in the marital war. It is true that not everyone discovers the Lord in this way; some would argue that it is distinctly unChristian, in fact, to become a convert in the hope that it might really upset somebody. But God, famously, moves in mysterious ways.