This Lent, I cannot forsake wine gums – life is too grim without them

It is hard to know how many pancakes is too many. I don’t recall any occasion when I felt I couldn’t have squeezed one more in, had it been available.

As to how many is not enough, that is a rather different question. Eight or nine could hardly be deemed insufficient. Six or seven? Quite satisfactory. Even three or four would be adequate. But just two? It’s barely enough to touch the sides.

And yet by the time my children had rolled and folded, and scoffed and slurped their fill last Tuesday evening, there was only enough batter left in the bowl for me and my wife to enjoy a couple of pancakes each. They were, it must be said, quite large. But their deliciousness was all too fleeting, and we despaired at our failure to foresee our offspring’s gluttony – and the restriction it would cause to our own.

Still, it was perhaps appropriate that I should not be able to stuff myself with sugary, buttery pancakes on this Shrove Tuesday, given that by then I had decided I was not going to follow my usual Lenten promise of giving up chocolate and sweets until Easter.

In normal times, eschewing those goodies has been hard enough – the sweets in particular. I am, for my sins, the kind of person who finds it difficult to go into a petrol station without buying a packet of wine gums. I have also been known to buy large quantities of pick’n’mix for the children, only to hand over quite small quantities when I get back home. While I love all sorts of fine foods, I don’t believe there is anything more delectable than one of those really sour, blue and pink, chewy cola bottles.

So hard has the temptation been, that in my weakest years I allowed myself white chocolate on the grounds that the absence of cocoa solids rendered it outside the scope of my vow. Alternatively, I might decide that cake was permissible, provided there was no chocolate icing or jellied diamonds involved.

It sounds weak, but really, what would Jesus do? Forgive, hopefully.

Anyway, this year, life is frankly too grim to be abandoning the snacks that have been helping to keep me sane since last March. And although I realise that I should stand firmer in the face of an apparently greater challenge, I am not sure I’m up to it.

Instead, I’m going to do what a Christian probably should be doing as a matter of course, and spend some time reading the Bible. That may sound like a cop-out, but given how little time I find to read anything, it will not be as easy as it sounds – and certainly no less of a test than avoiding Haribo Tangfastics.

It has been a slight oddity of this lockdown that public acts of worship have, albeit with significant restrictions, been permitted throughout. I have attended services rarely, anxious about raising my Covid risk (or inadvertently posing one to others); and when I have been to church, I have found it hard to focus.

But in step with my decision to have a more proactive Lent than usual, I attended a service last week for Ash Wednesday. There were not a great many of us – 30 perhaps – and this year no ash crosses were marked on foreheads. Instead, congregants queued to have the ashes of last year’s palm crosses sprinkled on their heads. As my turn came, I felt glad to have a full head of hair.

Different though it may have been in these pandemic times, the “ashing” remained as moving as ever it was; perhaps even more so – a reminder, in the silence of a church which has stood for many centuries, that we all come from dust, and in the end will return to dust.

Whether that is a comforting thought depends on your point of view. But it is certainly worth a bit of quiet reflection – preferably with a box of chocolates or a packet of sweets close at hand.