Actually, I really like all those Flemish paintings with groupings of saints, it must go back to the plaster martyrs… I love the one with the axe in his head. He just carries on as if nothing has happened. How cool, even for a saint.

Do I hear an offer of Pollo San Lorenzo? That chocolate dip last night whetted my appetite for more exotic things.

Your comments on Good Friday reminded me of my childhood. I used to be really shocked after all the tragedy of the Crucifixion that family members just came home and treated the day like a holiday. It seemed so insensitive not to spend the rest of the day in deepest mourning and shock.

That was, of course, before I forgave Judas who opened up a whole new world for me but Lent is not the time to confess anything about that.

I remember Lent as a time when my mother served fried fish every Friday (wonderful) and the church went largely undecorated (boring). I think I mostly endured Lent as too long and static a period of a single mood, instead focusing all of my luxurious young spiritual agonies on Good Friday, which commemorated after all the blackest and most hopeless day in the history of the universe, in other words a typical Monday for a typical adolescent.

Honestly I’m not sure I need to go there any more.

By the way, Saint Lawrence was grilled, not flayed. I know this because I make an excellent Pollo San Lorenzo.

It is weird how some of these childhood things stay with me though.
I do feel I am sinning to tell you the truth by not recognising Lent.

It makes me feel like a naughty boy!