An English Catholic.

Tomorrow is St Patrick's Day and perhaps it is a good day as any to confess to something that I seldom mention; I am, that rare breed, a totally English Catholic. When I was a child I found this very puzzling. Almost all the kids in my class were from Ireland or of Irish stock and so were the teachers. I asked my mother repeatedly about it as I felt very left out, but no, my mother was absolutely sure, we were English. And so things remained until I met Alex. He was, and is, an amateur historian and is half Irish himself. He was fascinated by the idea of an English Catholic with apparently no Irish roots. "How could you be?" he mused "For many centuries it was almost impossible to be a Catholic in England unless you were very wealthy. There were no Churches and no priests." But thanks to the internet he has recently managed to solve the mystery. For many centuries my ancestors were workers on the Estate of a Catholic landowner who insisted that all his workers were Catholics. How the landowner managed to stay onside with the some of the ruling monarchs we don't know but somehow he did. So we don't actually celebrate St Patrick's Day in our family but we will be wearing a rose on St Georges Day!