Unlike everyone on my Instagram feed, I don't have any photos of me with the Pope

but he did nearly run me over.

The Spectators by María Berrío, 2024

I nearly got run over by the Pope. Not the one who’s just died - it was 1982 and Pope John Paul the Second was paying a visit to York, England. I was five years old, nearly six, and despite my age I bet I’d been the one to badger my mum to take us to see him.

She may well have been interested too, but any time anyone famous or royal came to our small city I was the most desperate to get close to them; to touch the hem of their garment. We weren’t a Catholic family, so it wasn’t that. (I did go on to start thinking of myself as godlike, though, but that’s another story that I might write a book about and then set fire to.)

I thought famous people had to be the best people. That they had won some social gold by deciphering some social code. I mean, they had, although the Pope’s journey was arguably different. I think I spent so much of my childhood closely observing the popular children at school and working out what they did, how they held the attention of others, that observing the famous became a natural extension of my day job. Even at five or six I can remember sensing quite strongly that my ways were too formal and self-conscious and that I would have to change. Develop a more carefree attitude. Be less prudish. Win this thing.

Years later, I read that Madonna had viewed losing her virginity “a career move.” I could see her point. It had worked?

Looking at my face in those young photos, now, I see a sweet little frown with a little old man inside it, deeply concerned about correctness and protocol. He’d have to go. I spent many years slowly giving him his marching orders. The irony, of course, is that I developed some quite relentless protocol about how to appear not to follow any. And I also became increasingly interested in religion, and Popes. Life is not as straightforward as this short piece of writing would like it to be.

(If you’d told me then that I would go on to have a career interviewing celebrities for the newspapers I would have been surprised. That I was the one asking the questions, not answering them.)

We lived in a very small village halfway between York and Leeds at the time, so we drove into town, left my Mum’s Renault on the part of York racecourse that had been turned into a car park and walked over the grass to stand behind the barriers and wait for his His Holiness to turn up.

We knew he’d be in his Popemobile, a big sort of jeep/truck/campervan with a glass box on the top for him to stand upright in and wave at us all. Like a living coffin. We had seen it on the news - I think he’d been driving all around Europe in this fabulously absurd Popemobile on some kind of grand tour - which is probably what had made us want to go. In fact, it is entirely possible that only I was there for the Pope and the rest of my family were there for his car.

Though I should explain that as a child called Sophie, Soph, Soph Poph, my family nickname had firmly settled on Poph, which I was happy with. So I had come to think of that vehicle as the Pophmobile. I mean it was basically my car. What it is to be blessed with a vivid ego - all small children should have one.

We got to the barriers as the crowds gathered, and I asked my mum how come some special people were allowed to stand on the other side of the barriers? Being a bit young to comprehend words like ‘steward’ my mum simplified it by saying that only people in yellow t-shirts were allowed to do that. We mere mortals in other colours had to wait.

But she must have forgotten the yellow t-shirt I had on! Aha, I thought cunningly, I’ll wait until it’s time and then dash through these barriers myself, and not a court in the land will be able to stop me. Me in my lil yellow t-shirt. Go Poph!

So the Popemobile cruised into sight, with the old Polish bigot waving aloft out of the top of it (oh he wasn’t like the woke Pope we’ve just had, he was far kinder to paedophiles and family values - funny how those two go together so well). I ran out from under the barrier to get a really good look at God’s representative in Yorkshire - and I’m not sure what happened next but I do remember there was shouting, people grabbing at me, yanking me back to safety into the swollen crowds, out of the way of his big holy dumper truck as it rolled through us all.

Couldn’t they see I was wearing a yellow t-shirt? Why was I in trouble now? Grown-ups - so wearyingly inconsistent. I like to think his driver took a swerve to avoid me, but history does not relate.

And I can’t ask my mum, for fear she will say something along the lines of, you’ve invented this whole story and we never even saw the Pope. In fact, there are no such things as Popes. York doesn’t even exist. And neither do you.

York Racecourse, June 1982 - I think I was in there somewhere…