If you’re of a certain age and you were brought up Catholic, you’ll remember ‘Good Friday’ as the most awful misnomer. It was the most miserable day in the Catholic calendar – the day we commemorated the death of Our Saviour.

Any display of happiness or cheer was strictly forbidden on Good Friday. A dark pall of gloom would descend every year and engulf Irish Catholic strongholds like Kilburn, Cricklewood, Wealdstone and Wembley. These normally convivial communities that had coalesced around Irish pubs, dancehalls and the Catholic Church were suddenly subject to a blanket ban on all forms of pleasure. Watching TV, playing records in the house or football in the park were all stringently prohibited because Good Friday was a day devoted to solemnity.

Or should I say mock-solemnity.

Even as a child, I could see that it was all a bit of a charade. It was like an old Hollywood movie that we’d all seen before. Yes, there was the sad bit where the hero gets nailed to a cross, but we all know he doesn’t stay dead for long. In fact, a couple of days later, he’s wandering around the neighbourhood, sporting a few minor abrasions.

And yet every year, we had to indulge in this performative nonsense. At three o’clock, we’d be marched up to church for a service that wasn’t mass. No, Good Friday was the only day of the year deemed too sombre to celebrate mass. So we, the bewildered and benighted children, would sit among mournful Catholic faces pretending to be sad about the temporary death 2,000 years ago of someone we’d never met.

Easter Saturday, if anything, was even more bizarre. If you are going to be miserable on the Friday because your idol is dead then surely you should still be grief-stricken on the Saturday too. And yet it was deemed perfectly okay for the smiles to return and to pile into Woolworth’s to buy Easter eggs.

As kids, we loathed Good Friday so much that, as adults, we made a point of rebelling against it. Susan – the third of my four sisters and a fantastic cook – instituted the tradition of ‘Bad Friday’. Our clan get together at her house to eat, drink and get very, very merry. At three o’clock, in joyous contrast to the silent solemnity of that service, you’ll hear loud music, even louder laughter and the sounds of another cork being drawn from another bottle of wine which we no longer have to pretend is the blood of Christ.

Now, like the huge Irish community of Kilburn, the faux-funereal Good Friday is a thing of the past and good riddance to it. Those sorrowful, sanctimonious faces in church were early prototypes of the censorious virtue-signalling with which we’re now so familiar.

And yet, there’s something about the whole ridiculous ritual that I miss.

It was miserable but it was harmless and it wasn’t forced upon anybody outside of the Catholic community. Those beliefs and declarations didn’t affect or infect our institutions, our workplaces or the functioning of wider society. And unlike more contemporary cultural tyranny, it was confined to one day a year rather than 365.

The bewildered children who grew into stupendously lapsed Catholics view all cultural tyrants with suspicion. When we see people, for example, symbolically gluing themselves to busy roads, we think, ‘Hmm. We know a faith substitute when we see one’. And we’re reminded of that old GK Chesterton quote, ‘When people stop believing in God, it’s not that they believe in nothing. It’s that they believe in anything.’