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Patricia Nicol I HOPE nobody has woken up this morning sickened with stickyfingered guilt that yesterday their good intentions melted away with the chocolate.

Easter Sunday is not a feast day to be too po-faced about. With it we celebrate rebirth, spring and, er, chocolate. Last week was for penitence. Now you can allow yourself a moment’s overindulgence.

Judged strictly on confectionery, my best ever Easter was spent with a French family in Brittany. I remember the prettiness of the packaging, not just of mini eggs, but also of cones of praline chocolates. These feature in Joanne Harris’s French fancy, Chocolat, which begins at a Lenten Carnival and builds up to an explosive Easter Sunday.

Single mother Vianne Rocher is the charismatic chocolatier who sends the citizens of Lansquenetsous-Tannes into paroxysms of ecstasy with her pralines and peanut brittles. She intuits what will bring her customers comfort, so the village’s buttoned-up curate decides she is a witch. But is he demonising pleasure?

There is more gentle fun-poking at puritanical thinking in Isak Dinesen’s classic novella, Babette’s Feast. Babette is the French maid of Norwegian spinsters, daughters of a Protestant pastor.

When Babette wins the lottery, her employers assume she will return home and grant her wish to prepare a farewell feast. Troubled by the extravagance of her undertaking, their Puritan guests decide the most tactful course will be to ignore the cooking. But Babette’s food is unignorable.

So is Willy Wonka in Roald Dahl’s Charlie And The Chocolate Factory. Here, Dahl is the moralist, comparing the ghastly grasping of Veruca Salt, Augustus Gloop et al with the lovely Charlie Bucket, a boy who would share his last square of Wonka Bar with his bedbound grandparents.

There’s nothing wrong with overindulging occasionally, but there are consequences of doing it daily. If you’ve got unsafe quantities of chocolate in your home, today’s a good day for swallowing the evidence.