I SAT with Joan Bakewell some years ago at a witch-gathering spot on Pendle as television cameras silently taped our chit-chat about morality, faith and alternative spiritualities.

I warmed to her personality, as did millions of viewers in her heyday, yet our conversation was clinically cold as she probed my views, striving for the heart of a particular matter.

This week I found myself smiling at her ‘conversion’ on some of the moral issues we’d chatted about so long ago. She explained on the BBC why Christian morality watchdog Mary Whitehouse, a heroine of mine, had been right after all.

Every now and then, human U-turns provide pleasant surprises, especially when they’re of the godly or spiritual variety.

Malcolm Muggeridge was the arch-atheist of my youth and then, suddenly, there he was admitting, “I can say that I never knew what joy was like until I gave up pursuing happiness, or cared to live until I chose to die. For these two discoveries I am beholden to Jesus.”

Remember Chuck Colson, President Nixon’s feared ‘hatchet man’. He found God in prison and the Boston Globe reported, “If he can repent of his sins, there just has to be hope for everybody.”

Frank Morrison, a sceptic who set out to disprove the Resurrection, ended up writing Who Moved the Stone, the complete evidence of how Jesus beat death.

Maybe it is simply age that produces wisdom. Or is it that the nearer we get to meeting God, the more we want to get things right?