Last week I came across a friend of a friend. A thirty-three-year old called Andy, who lives on England’s South Coast - working in a call centre by day and as a nightclub DJ by night. We found ourselves across from each other at dinner and both desperate to escape the predominant conversation at our end of the table about either schools or satellite navigation systems (if I ever hear again how someone “nearly drove into the sea because of a faulty satellite navigation system” I shall happily accept the ASBO).

To maintain a modicum of sanity amidst the bleaters at our end of the table, we struck up a private conversation and I discovered, while consuming my potage starter, that Andy used to be a member of the Catholic group Opus Dei.

I was puzzled as to how he was recruited, what Opus Dei actually got up to (alas mortification of the flesh came up just as the waiter posited my T-bone in front of me) and, most of all, I wanted to know how he left.

Opus Dei has about 87,000 members in more than 80 different countries. About 70% of Opus Dei members live in their private homes, leading traditional Catholic family lives with secular careers, while the other 30% are celibate, of whom the majority live in official Opus Dei centres. As well as working in more traditional charitable work through its members, Opus Dei is involved in setting up and running universities, university residences, schools, publishing houses and technical and agricultural training centres. Founded in Madrid in 1928, Opus Dei has been the subject of various controversies during its lifetime (most recently Opus Dei received some unwanted attention due to the extraordinary success of the novel The Da Vinci Code, in which both Opus Dei and the Catholic Church itself are depicted very negatively). It could be considered - in terms of the spectrum of views that is the Catholic Church - to sit at the (extreme?) right of catholic ideological positioning.

Andy told me that what made him leave Opus Dei was his discovery of Trance Music. Simple as that. He heard it on the radio one day and his life course changed.