101 YEARS OLD AND STILL NOT GIVING ANYTHING UP...

YESTERDAY, I offered a homemade chocolate to a young lady colleague and was astonished when she declined, informing me that she had given up chocolate for Lent. It was a dark chocolate filled with a ganache that I invented, made of Cointreau, cream, passion fruit and white chocolate and giving up such a treat struck me as taking the whole of this Lent business too seriously.

I have therefore compiled a list of my top five recommendations for Things That Are Better To Give Up For Lent Than Chocolates.

5: Offering fine chocolates to unappreciative young ladies. Giving this up will save time, save chocolates, avoid the pain of rejection and save one from an experience which can severely dent one’s opinion of human nature and good taste.

4: New Year’s Resolutions. Most of these, of course, one will have given up already, so giving them up again for Lent will be no trouble at all. However, if you do have any resolutions which you have resolutely kept throughout January and a good deal of February, now is surely a good time to call a halt to it. You may smugly congratulate yourself on having kept the resolutions for far longer than most and revert to your 2017 levels of guzzling, hedonism and self-indulgence.

3: Worrying about Brexit, Donald Trump, nuclear war, terrorism and global warming. The first is going to happen and we’ll see how it goes when we get there; the second has already happened and there’s nothing we can do about it; the third hasn’t happened yet and there’s not much we can do if it does; the fourth will probably happen somewhere else and global warming has been going on since the end of the last Ice Age.

In fact, we might as well stop worrying altogether. It doesn’t help and is liable to lead to worrying about worrying, which makes things worse.

2: Tea bags. I’ve never really understood these things and they can be a real problem if one does not happen to have a convenient waste paper basket near one’s cup.

Finding discarded tea bags around the house is so depressing. Personally, I prefer using a Sloth Tea Infuser, which is a rubber sloth which can be divided into two, allowing tea leaves to be placed in the lower half which is conveniently perforated. One then clips the halves together again and places the sloth inside a cup or mug, with its front paws clinging to the rim.

Boiling water may then be added, leaving the tea to infuse. When it is ready, the sloth is removed and the tea may be drunk. Hours of fun for all the family. Or you can just make the tea in a teapot and pour it through a strainer. The choice is yours.

1: Abstention. This, I have found through a lifetime’s experience, is the perfect thing to give up for Lent. Not only can one then enjoy again all the things one has abstained from, but one can wallow in the self-righteousness of having given something up. Not only that but unlike chocolates, or sweets or cake, or whatever other people give up, abstention from abstention can last you a lifetime and not just for Lent.