The first year I consciously 'did' Lent I was 15.  I gave up sugar in tea/coffee (no small undertaking in a family where everyone else had two teaspoons of sugar in everything).  Over the following years the abstentions grew and grew - no sweets, no chocolate, no puddings, no sugar at all, no caffeine.  Each year I collected the money I would/might have spent on these and donated it to charity - SCIAFs 'wee box' idea is not exactly new, though it's a good one.

Yesterday's weekly shop included a pack of dark chocolate digestive biscuits, made by a firm based in Leicestershire as it happens.  So each day I can have just one chocolate digestive (that will be a challenge once the pack is open) as I ponder my many blessings and the temptations that we in the affluent west are so readily seduced by.  I don't think the cost of a pack of biscuits is going to make a good donation to anything, so I will, belatedly, join in with others across Bappy-land doing the Christian Aid 'Count Your Blessings' scheme.

It struck my in an idle moment that I've 'done Lent' for as many years as tradition tells us Jesus lived, so maybe I am entitled to a year off for good behaviour?!