Christmas hasn’t been the same since I gave up God for sex.

What a wanton trade-off that seems in retrospect all these decades later, but there you go. It is, in fact, the truth – or at least the truth as I glibly spun it in the ensuing years to friends who wanted to know why the daughter of a Presbyterian minister from a small mining town in South Africa had chucked in the faith she was born into without so much as a rueful backward glance.