At the start of Lent, temptation is all around us.  We are off chocolate but we shop surrounded by Easter eggs.  Mind you, every time I sit down to work, which for me often (supposedly) involves a lot of reading and writing, I am beset by temptation.  I’m tempted to eat. I’m tempted to put the kettle on.  I’m tempted to read the paper (in the name of ‘research’, of course). Writing this, I was sorely tempted to hoover the house as a displacement activity.  Since I can, like Oscar Wilde’s Lord Darlington, resist everything but temptation, this is a problem.  Tragically, I did hoover the house.

It’s no surprise then that I’ve never done very well at sticking to resolutions.  I did once swear off butter for Lent, but my bread turned to ashes, I missed it day and night and welcomed it back passionately after Easter, with open arms, a loaf and a toaster. My trousers wept for me.

But the temptations that resolutions bring are not just to eat toast, to drink wine or to gorge on chocolate.  Resolutions made, broken and abandoned tempt us to judge ourselves and others for our failure to be resolute or for their lack of inner steel. The rush to judgement is a miserable thing, though. It makes us unhappy with ourselves and it skews our relationships. How often do our conversations about others focus on their perceived failings? And how many failings are more public than a failed resolution?

It’s no surprise, then, that wise people throughout history have warned us against taking judgement into our own hands.  Jesus was pretty clear on the issue: ‘Do not judge, or you too will be judged…why look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye when there is a plank in yours?’  The Koran offers similar advice: ‘be patient until Allah judges between us. He is the best of judges’.  Shakespeare knew it too: ‘Forbear to judge, for we are sinners all’. So if you are going to commit giving something up this Lent, don’t be too hard on yourself if you slip up.  And don’t be too hard on those around you: they are experiencing exactly the same lack-of-butter night terrors as you.  Oh, and take Sundays off.  It’s not about punishment, it’s about discipline.  Even I might manage six days at a time without butter and imagine how good that’ll feel.

This should probably have been called Lent. But butter is better.