"My Song: 'Tantum Ergo'"

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Try to guess who wrote this.  A clue: he is alive, aged 54, and has been published just in the last month in at least the Daily Mail, the Guardian and Private Eye.

"We had two Masses a week, on Wednesdays and Sundays, and two Benedictions, on Tuesdays and Fridays. Every Benediction, we would sing a hymn called "Tantum Ergo". "Tantum ergo/ Sacramentum/ Veneremur cernui/ Et antiquo/ Documentum..." We sang it twice a week for five years. We never asked what it meant, and I still don't know. Sacraments, venerate, antique, documents ... but its meaning didn't matter. Its sound was its meaning; its absence of meaning was its meaning. Latin was God's first language, its meaning floating direct to heaven on a cloud of incense pouring out of a thurible swung with such vigour by the seniors that the new boys in the front row would often disappear, coughing and splutter­ing, in an unholy fog.

Thirty or more years on, I make my living from parody, nudging sense into nonsense, translating the words of others back into their original gibberish. I find "Tantum Ergo" has lodged in my head, a dissident group of my brain cells forming a chapel choir, singing it at full blast in impromptu moments. And my imagination keeps returning to Farleigh House, Farleigh Wallop, Basingstoke, Hants. Or perhaps it has always been stranded there, the boarder that never came home.
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Craig Brown