"It's hard for me to get used to these changing times. I can remember when the air was clean and sex was dirty."

Well! I leave the blog for a month and the whole world seems to have gone mad. There's uprisings throughout the Middle East, a tsunami in Japan and Blue are to represent Britain in the Eurovision song contest. God help us.

What may surprise you then is that I have not chosen any of these important events as the topic of this evening's blog. All are too serious, too profound, too weighty matters for me to discuss. Yes, I do mean Blue. The folly of their candidature is beyond mockery; someone needs to find the people who made that decision and lock them safely away from society in a padded room. They should be forced to endure several weeks of 'All Rise' on loop and then look us in the eye and tell us that they made the right choice.

Instead I have decided to have a muse and a chuckle on the topic of 'Lent'.

Lent is an odd period of the year. It is a religious festival that tends to prove what little willpower the average human possesses. It's commencement is somewhat akin to that of a New Year. For some strange reason it manages to make us feel guiltier than any other time of the year simply by the fact that it traditionally requires something to be given up. In fact, the only way in which it truly differs from this other moment of attempted self-denial is that a New Year usually begins with a huge party and a brief instant of sublime hedonism. Lent will never offer the joy of a drunken younger brother aiming to pour water into his mouth but in fact pouring it all over himself, all the while muttering "I hate my life". Nor will it bring the delight that is 'Auld Lang Syne'; a song whose very title suggests that Robert Burns himself was drunk at an 18th Century New Year's Eve party when he wrote it due to it's appalling spelling and incomprehensibility.

Lent instead brings with it a sense of misery. This isn't a self-denial that looks to improvement through the breaking of habits; it is a self-denial that serves as an atonement for sins committed in an attempt to make us feel better about ourselves. It was originally intended to shadow the sufferings of Jesus as he spent forty days wandering the wilderness with neither food nor water, although on this occasion, I have to admit, I wouldn't say Jesus is a particularly good role model. Not eating or drinking for forty days and nights is not a healthy way to lose those pounds you put on after Christmas, and you have to remember that Jesus came before the days of McDonalds, ready meals and Jamie Oliver telling us in that oh-so-grating cockney accent that we should be eating more healthily. His mother probably just gave him a good breakfast before sending him off to dice with the devil. And this is the son of God we're talking about here! Christ, if he can reanimate his own corpse after 3 days he can sure as hell pull off a David Blaine!

Lent has, however, for many lost its religious sentiment and retains from it only the conviction that by making our lives a little bit worse we are somehow better people. I concede that there are some habits that are best broken, and if a date such as Ash Wednesday is the impetus someone needs to do so then the best of luck to them. But the rest of the world seems to go mad, finding vice in even the most harmless of diversions. Terrible evils are repented of. The demon that is alcohol tops the list, followed swiftly by other such dastardly pleasures as sugar, sex and that vile modern demon; Facebook. I see you shudder from the pulpit my friends, and why should you not? Are these not all cardinal vices for which one must spend a thousand years in the fiery pits of hell being tortured by Lucifer himself to the eternal soundtrack of the 'Best of Blue' compilation?

Or are these things just simple pleasures, the simple pleasures that make the mundane that little bit more enjoyable? Giving them up doesn't make us in any way better people; we just end up trading the virtue of pleasure for the vice of self-righteousness. What's worse is that so few people manage to go the full forty days. Instead of admiring their achievement, they become more repentant than an axe murderer on death row, as if by enjoying a small square of Dairy Milk they were damning their immortal souls. Surely this isn't the best way to do things?

I appreciate Ash Wednesday has passed, but if you (like myself) missed it as it sailed you by, I suggest that instead of giving something up you take the opportunity to do something new. Sign up to something. Read a book in the thirty-six days you have left. Or instead of giving up alcohol, just decide to drink one less pint on a night out. For the love of all things good though, don't give up enjoying things. Life is for living it up, not giving it up.