Other times the questions are not so friendly. Journalists are bright enough to realise that there might be a subterranean dimension to this work, and feel that some aggressive interrogation is called for. In the US especially, beset with its all-encompassing culture wars, some hacks figure out that all is not well with Quickening! "Do you not realise", they fulminate, "just how offensive and divisive this piece might be?"

 "Why offensive? Why divisive?" I inquire, jaw loose in amazement.

 "Well, because of all this, um, eh, er..." they bluster, "all this...well, um...all this ‘life' stuff!"

Hmm. All this "life" stuff, indeed. That would be in contradistinction to all this "death" stuff then? Not that there is anything wrong in artists exploring the mystery of death in their work. I do it all the time too. But when our world can become so anaesthetised, to the point of being a couple of notches out on the moral compass from hailing Harold Shipman-types as heroes of a new compassionate utilitarianism, we should pause for thought.

 Or what about this particular elephant in the room? President Barack Obama recently signed a law decreeing that federal statutes must no longer use the term "mental retardation". The phrase replacing it will be "intellectual disability". How the opponents of social discrimination rejoiced. No longer would children with Down's syndrome suffer the indignity of social stigma. The thesaurus comes to their rescue. Well, at least the 10 per cent of them that we allow to exist anyway — the other 90 per cent being discriminated out of existence because we have all been convinced that there is such a thing as "life unworthy of life", to borrow a term from an earlier eugenical era. And our new elites bridle indignantly at the charge that they preside over a "culture of death". What other prettified words or phrases from the thesaurus would they prefer?

This is the background context to the 21st century's fractured landscape, where families snap apart and communities self-implode. And so, is there any place left for an artist's need for self-definition as a father? Can an artist be inspired and even shaped by his decision to build a family rather than reject the potential? Is this a determined stance for future life?

 Who knows, but there is definitely something in the air. Even David Cameron has dared to take on the 50-year orthodoxies of finger-wagging bullies, by declaring that marriage really does work best. Are some of us  developing the courage to take on the ruling elites and put family, marriage, fatherhood, motherhood, the fullness of human flourishing, the good life, Christianity even, (for Christ's sake!), the culture of life, not death, back where it belongs — at the centre of the public square?