My sister has a friend who is a Northern Irish Protestant. Her friend was describing to my sister a weekend she had spent with her elderly parents at home in Co. Down. Getting them out to church was a nightmare apparently; getting them ready was a labour of love; then helping them into the car and then zooming to the church trying not to arrive too late. “Late, you were nearly late?” said my sister, “I thought Protestants were never late.” “Well,” confided her friend, “it was my mother, her father was a Catholic from the South and my father and I think that the older she gets, the more like him she becomes.”