A university lecturer has criticised parents for being dismissive when their seven-year-old daughter told them that she saw an angel at her bedside every night, which she felt comforted by.
Quite right, too. Perhaps she had seen an angel. Children, if they are truthful and well, should be taken seriously. They know the difference between pretend and real. Parents collude with children in treating Teddy as a person, but, though Teddy falling out of the car may be heartbreaking, the child well knows it is not the same as your sister falling out.
Angels are not cuddly toys, and it is not just children who believe in them. They have become an adult craze. Gone are the merely jokey fancies, such as the angel Clarence in It's a Wonderful Life (1946) or John Travolta, heaven help us, as an angel in Michael (1996). Unjokey books like Angels in My Hair by Lorna Byrne or Angels Watching Over Me by Jacky Newcomb sell millions.
Miss Jacky Newcomb, at the paranormal end of the angel spectrum, enjoys endorsements from Uri Geller. Miss Lorna Byrne, whose memoir Angels in My Hair was bought for a six-figure sum by the publishers of The Da Vinci Code, is more devotional. "Remember strangers give you messages from your Angels too." she says. "It could be a shop assistant, a bus driver, a neighbour's child."
Guardian angels remain most popular, with 38 per cent of us believing in them, if we credit a single opinion poll. But it doesn't take a vision of a winged messenger with a flaming sword to convince people, once the possibility of angelic intervention is entertained. Gloria Hunniford has found angels very helpful in finding parking places.
If you ask me, there's something in all this. One day, after lunch, the late Jennifer Paterson, formerly one of the Two Fat Ladies, accidentally locked me out of my house in Shepherd's Bush by closing the front door behind us in the front garden. What impressed me was her instant success in attracting the attention of a passing youth and persuading him to shin over the back wall and break into the house.
I assumed he was part of the skilled Shepherd's Bush burgling community. Later I wondered: perhaps it was an angel.
It is the clergy who are behind the curve on angelic belief. The Bible says that the angel Gabriel, for example, brought word to the Virgin Mary. But the wobbly Sixties generation of priests tended to explain away such references as a metaphor for more earthly kinds of messenger.
Gabriel is also credited by Muslims with delivering the word of God to Mohammed in the Koran. It would be a brave know-all who publicly pooh-poohed that belief.
Theologically, angels are perfectly respectable. God is an uncreated spirit; human beings are bodily creatures with a spiritual component; angels are spiritual creatures with no bodily component. They have intellect and will and are much cleverer than we are. Satan is an angel gone to the bad.
Traditional Jewish, as well as Christian, speculation holds that there are millions more angels than there are human beings. So encountering one at your bedside would be only too likely.
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