A NOW infrequent question this time of the year is 'what have you given up for Lent?'

The category includes the young and old, rich and poor, female and male etc, but with some movement away from older, simpler forms of self-denial - smoking, football matches, gambling, food (especially chocs and cakes for the young), increased spiritual activities etc.

It's all intended to lead to improvement, growth, better living etc - and let's hope it does.

Obviously sometimes things go wrong; grandad gives up his pipe for 40 days and becomes a bl.... nuisance for 40 days.

Some, too, will say you don't need to look for crosses, that if you live out your life responsibly, help others, make efforts to be friendly and involved, attentive to truth and justice, you will probably encounter hostility, contradiction, untruth etc and that those crosses will be sufficient for anyone!

But perhaps most of us could reduce crosses for others if we curbed our own quick temper, easy irritation, insensitivity and unpleasantness at times.

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Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.