WHEN I LOOK back on my life between the ages of about eighteen and twenty-four, I am astounded to realise just how many things changed, not only in my circumstances (from school to national service, to university, to marriage and to Australia), but also in how I thought about fundamental questions of life, philosophy, religion and politics. No doubt many people go through significant transitions around that period of their lives, but in my case it seems to have been particularly extreme. Obviously, it was a time of exploration, but I seemed to be picking up things and dropping them again in quick succession. My mother said to me more than once, ‘You never stick at anything.’ This was not entirely accurate, because I was determined to develop intellectual abilities, and getting into Oxford through classics was both a strategy towards that end and based on genuine interest in languages, history, literature and increasingly politics. But while I seemed to know which way I wanted to go in broad terms, there was a certain will o’ the wisp character in my tendency to sample new things briefly, and also to reject abruptly ideas or activities that I had been involved in for a long time. I dropped sailing, which had been a long-term passion, and when my parents and I revisited Nefyn and the mountains of North Wales, and indeed Salcombe, I indicated rather too clearly to them that I was bored with those places. I think at times they were hurt, and I regret that.

In fact, the origins of these changes go back well before my fateful discovery that I was required to follow school with military training. Specialising in classics as I had been, I was in the company of school friends some of whom were taking classics as a step on the road to a theological degree and ordination. Such was the case with Brian Coleman, a classicist whom I knew at school and later at Oxford, and also with Michael Counsell, who switched from science to arts subjects (not, I think classics). Both of them were ultimately ordained in the Church of England.