This has been going on for a while - ever since I came of drinking age and quickly learnt that a version of the truth on most national or local matters or at least an inkling can be found in the stranger sitting next to me in the pub; that woman in the mathree; that cab-driver late at night.

Here hid by shrub-wood, there by glimpses seen.

In place of the idea which runs through the Tanakh and New Testament of a God intimately involved with his creation and providentially repeatedly intervening in it, there was the concept of a God who had certainly created the world and set up its laws in structures understandable by human reason, but who after that allowed it to go its own way, precisely because reason was one of his chief gifts to humanity, and order a gift to his creation. This was the approach to divinity known as deism.

In his final years he [John Ogdon] gave an interview to an American journalist who noticed that his handshake is a boneless fadeaway[].