Family values

Those who know me will be aware that children are not my favourite thing. However, I am not an inflexible man - ho ho ho, I hear you cry - and on Friday the opportunity came up to infest myself on my my dear, dear friend Mike Hennessy and his family for the evening in Reading. I have not been feeling particularly 'up' recently and the prospect of a night in the warm embrace of family seemed just the tonic.

I first met Mike when I joined the House of Commons in 2005. How to describe him? Not an easy task. He is, first and foremost, a Catholic, father of eight home-schooled children, and a man who makes JP2 look like John Calvin. Not for him the liberal orthodoxies of Vatican II. His views on the current pontiff are, to put it mildly, trenchant. To say all of that, however, is somehow misleading. If Holy Mother Church is Mike's great guiding principle, his great love (apart from Kathryn, to whom we shall return) is The Good Life. He is a wine expert of considerable renown, who has forgotten more than I have ever known about the grape, and who accuses me (perhaps rightly) of having a terrible palate, but, like me, he can also appreciate the value - in every sense - of a bottle of Malbec from Lidl. We both know how to cut our cloth.

Mike and I hit it off immediately. It is difficult to say why. I am agnostic (at best), childless and, when we first got to know each other well, at that stage going through a divorce. I suppose I am a student of the Catholic Church, and I enjoy military history, a subject dear to his heart (ask him, or don't, about Indo-China). I know why I liked him: apart from enjoying a few glasses, his was and is a brain which fizzes and whirrs. He is a devotee of Belloc and Chesterton, of David Jones and Jutland, of Rabelais and Aquinas. Lift the lid, and you will find something interesting happening. He even knows some salty stories about Eric Gill.

Anyway, we have been friends these past dozen years and can always fall into idle conversation about this and that (or that and this). I don't remember when I was first invited to Casa Hennessy in Reading, but it's a while ago. I was rather daunted. As I say, I don't much like children, and I knew that Mike had (at that point) seven (Gabriel has now been added to the flock). I'm not very good with younglings, and I also knew that Mike's were home-schooled, and I wondered if they'd be asocial freaks who had "spectrum" stamped on their foreheads.

As it happens, I needn't have worried about a thing. They were - and remain - the nicest and most balanced bunch of kids I've ever encountered. The older ones were polite, courteous and respectful; the younger ones were a bit daft and playful but so obviously kindly that I was taken aback. I didn't feel awkward, nor did they regard me strangely (as well they might). Stepping into their home was like dipping your toe into a bath at just the right temperature.

Mrs Hennessy. Kathryn is a fiercely bright woman who (I think I'm right in saying) read Russian at Oxford - she and Mike met at Oriel. She has shouldered the burden of the home-schooling, and the children are a tribute to both her and Mike. I discovered early on that she is from Hartlepool - I was born in Stockton, so not so far away - and I also found she had a love (not shared by Mike) for Prefab Sprout. So what's not to like? Seeing her again on Friday was a pleasure and a joy, as I hadn't seen her for, embarrassingly, probably a couple of years.

Friday night in the Hennessy household is pizza night. Many pizzas are required for parents plus eight children and hangers-on, and finding an appropriate film is not easy. Mike had bought One of our Dinosaurs is Missing from Amazon and we giggled our way through absurdity and comedy racism. (Peter Ustinov seems particularly fond of yellow-face impersonations: see Charlie Chan. Ah-so.)

There was plenty of wine, and after the film, as various children were dispatched to bed, we chatted and generally put the world to rights. Something which becomes easier with the latening of the hour.

What's my point here? I suppose it's this. Prima facie, I don't like children. But presented with such a lovely family, especially as I was feeling so low, it was a tonic of an evening. The warmth of human comfort is sometimes important.