No nibbling the Mikados
THE other day I asked a local youngster – a streetwise 10-yearold – what he thought of Lent. “You mean the past tense of loan?” he responded.
Like many a tradition integral to the childhood of my generation, this traditional period of abstinence appears to be experiencing a steadily weakening foothold among the adolescents of today.
Running from Ash Wednesday, falling on February 14 this year, to Easter Sunday, and prefaced by those fateful words, “Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return”, Lent marked our first official period of self-restraint, and one we took to with an extremely competitive enthusiasm. Promises made to each other in the playground to give up cakes, chocolate and fizzy pop were a real big deal
– and dictated an immediate guilty admission should said pledge be broken. Fibbing about that midnight munch of Dairy Milk was a total no-no, this was God’s work we were on, and ‘twas well known He had eyes everywhere.
Casting a glance over grainy black and white photos of those schooldays, practically nobody is overweight, so who knows, maybe that fasting helped as a bygone bulwark against childhood obesity.
“Lent comes providentially to reawaken us, to shake us from our lethargy,” says Pope Francis. “I distrust a charity that costs nothing and does not hurt.”
Well, Holy Father, I can truthfully report that the daily absence of Kimberley and Mikado biscuits did indeed leave a yawning wound in the deep recesses of my gut.
Of course, like all the best war stories, you need to chat with the over 75s generation to savour the true purgatorial nature of what Lent was like in its heyday. Jam, sugar and even bread were the delights forbidden to those post-war babies, and even listening to tunes on the radio was a frowned-upon activity in the era when asceticism and austerity ruled.
Such were the mathematical complexities of this taxing temperance, a calculator would have been useful – had they been invented then. No meat on Wednesdays and Fridays, and on alternate days those aged between 21 and 60 were restricted to just one small meal and two ‘collations’ – ie. tea and toast.
The whole business culminated on Holy Thursday, when turbo-charged penitents attended seven churches during the day. Mildly testing though it might be to deny ourselves a favourite treat for 40 days, spare a thought for those trapped in the crucifying purgatory of mortgage debt – a state Benjamin Franklin put in a context still relevant in 2018: “Those have a short Lent who owe money to be repaid at Easter.”