Lent was, historically, an annoying idea: take a time of year when there is nothing to eat anyway, and then dress up your abstemiousness as an article of faith. That is how it must have seemed, I am sure, to the medieval, lukewarm Christian. A bunch of people eschewing strawberries that hadn’t come up yet, to kid a God who knew as well as anyone what harvested when.

Modern Lent is less annoying, but more peculiar. Driven by neither scarcity nor faith – non-Christians go as crazy for self-denial as they do for Christmas – it is more like taking the temperature of mild collective anxiety. Anything you are really worried about, you will give up permanently, not just for six weeks. Classic Lent denials are all subsets: I’m not giving up screens, I’m giving up Twitter; not meat, just bacon; not alcohol, just spirits. It has a performative element, because if you didn’t want to tell everyone else, you wouldn’t do it at the same time as everyone else. But it is not a very exciting performance, since it is never personally very revealing. The air of religiosity around the tradition, regardless of how devout the Lent-observer is, means that even the thing you are giving up has to be broadly wholesome. Nobody gives up porn for Lent.

It is also impossible to police – with everybody giving up a different thing, how can you remember for more than five minutes what the thing was? It is transferable across every sphere and there doesn’t seem to be any do-gooding requirement, so you could give up binge-reading Jilly Cooper, which would benefit nobody, least of all yourself, but would fit perfectly into the random-self-flagellation frame. And it has the failure of its impermanence inbuilt, so that however good you are for a month and a bit, the other 10 months of the year, you are worse.