I WAS barely a twinkle in my dad’s eye. The atom was unsplit. So too was the unity of our world, and the families out of which it was built.

Dad looked on my mum-to-be and meant every single word of that ‘til death do us part’ promise.

After all, didn’t our Christian heritage assure us that British society was a unit built on solid bricks called families, the accepted form and norm?

In those days, this weekend of Whitsuntide was a holy celebration of endless processions to the Spirit of the Age, a Divine Spirit who’d designed marriage and society, the One who’d come down originally at Christmas and Easter to show us how to live together in love, hope, service and freedom.

Today, dad’s a fading twinkle in my eye, the atom’s been split, and so too has our world, and the way we treat this weekend marks the change like no other.

This is Britain’s forgotten weekend. Now, we don’t even mark it with holy-days. The holiday happens a week later and celebrates an entirely different unholy and confused spirit of our age.

When man split the atom it seemed to smash more than Hiroshima’s. It heralded an explosion that turned our society into shrapnel.

The splitting of the atom shattered old forms and norms and introduced us to new, sometimes seemingly-illogical, ways - quantum physics.

The subsequent splitting of our society buried the old under today’s irrational rubble, and we’re still trying to decide how to rebuild with unlikely coalitions and the like.

Thank God vestiges of His world can still be found for those who seek.