Dialogue: Church can't hold candle to shellfish

Last week I went to a Catholic wedding. The groom's family and friends on the right-hand side of the cathedral were Catholic. The bride's on the left were not.

The priest intoned prayers or whatever and from the right-hand side came responses as involuntary as breathing. From us on the left, nothing.

Catholicism fascinates me. As a child I went into churches only on holiday, when my mother would drag me round the flagged and cold interior of some cathedral to look at I don't know what, and I would sulk and pout and beg to be taken out and given ice cream.

At state primary school we used to say a prayer at the end of the day after we had put the chairs on the desk. The prayers were just noise. At secondary school religion meant Onward Christian Soldiers once a week in assembly just before the soccer results.

I was as secular as an animal but at university I had a lapsed Catholic friend called Dave. He was fun to drink with. Late in the evening a diabolical streak emerged in him. He did dangerous and memorable things which made me laugh.

Then one evening when I went to fetch him he looked mournfully at me and said he wasn't coming out. God, he said, had held him down in a chair and made him chose between good and evil, between the pub and the Lord. He had chosen the Lord.

I mocked. I argued. I wheedled. I said he had been brainwashed. He said he was sorry but he wouldn't budge.

For weeks I behaved appallingly. Whenever I saw Dave I would heckle him. He bore it all and continued to be kind to me. Nothing angered him. That angered me. Eventually the road between us fell into disuse. A while later I read Brideshead Revisited. And then I read The Power and the Glory. And though I knew I could never enter Dave's world, I thought I could begin to see something of how it worked.

A few years later I went to work in Spain. Of the two Catholic cathedrals in the city one was dark, medieval and empty. The other was built in the 18th century around a pillar on which the Virgin Mary was supposed to have appeared to a saint.

El Pilar lay on my way home from work and I took to dropping in. Passing the crippled beggars at the door, I would stroll with hundreds of other everyday people through the echoing aisles.

Sometimes I would be surprised by a service happening in a side chapel and I would scurry past. But also sometimes I would buy a candle, always paying more than I needed to, and would light it and place it on the rack by the door.

Behind the huge and jewelled altar, a part of the original holy pillar was exposed so that people could kiss it. A constant queue of men and women stood waiting their turn. I joined them only once. The pillar was cold black marble. As I laid my lips on it I felt like a fraud.

That Christmas Eve I ate shellfish with a girl called Maria, then we went to midnight mass. We went not to the popular Pilar but to La Seo, the medieval palace of gloom. When the choir came up the nave with candles, I shivered. My shivering rocked the pew. I woke up in a bed in Maria's flat where a drunken doctor, who had been summoned from a Christmas party, was injecting my buttock with a medieval-looking syringe. Apparently I had collapsed during the service and writhed on the flagstones squealing. Men had had to carry me out to a taxi.

I spent Christmas and Boxing Day and the day after Boxing Day throwing up bile and being injected. The doctor said it was probably the shellfish. When I got better I facetiously said it was God. He had struck down the infidel, I said.

I still go into Catholic churches. I am surprised by what Larkin called the hunger in himself to be more serious. I have heard all sorts of stories from lapsed Catholic friends about indoctrination, about guilt, about cruel nuns, but I wish I knew the dogmatic certainty of the Catholic faith if only as something to kick against.

I envy the faithful the Latin mass, censers and chasubles - whatever a chasuble is - communion and confessional, a ritual sanctified by thousands of years of use. But however much I might think that I want to sit on the right-hand side of the cathedral, I shall only ever sit on the postwar baby-boomer left, the sceptical product of my age and upbringing, barren of mysticism, impatient for ice cream and the bright light of the mortal day outside.