Lenten abstinence is over and, like Lillian and Eddie in ‘The Archers’, people are busy retoxing across the country. In the ‘Daily Telegraph’ a columnist announces, “I didn’t give up booze this year for Lent - I gave up the crossword, devoting the time to reading through ‘The Divine Comedy’”.

As gratuitous references to Dante go, this was trumped by a wine writer’s recent recommendation of a Vouvray, “Chenin Blanc can be a difficult grape to eat with but I fed this wine to my Dante reading group along with a heart attack of a fish pie . . . and the two communicated perfectly.”

Is temporary abstinence wise? I think of the Bishop addressing the British Expeditionary Force at Christmas, in 1915, “I have been advised, at my age, not to attempt to give up alcohol.”

Cecil Torr writes in “Small Talk in Wreyland” (1918-23) that his mother started him on port before he was two, convinced that it would prevent him from ever being ill. “I never was ill enough to spend a day in bed till I was fifty-five; and might never have been ill at all, if I had gone on drinking port proportionately; but I degenerated with the times and only drank two glasses, not two bottles, as I should.”

And was it a Rothschild who stymied a censorious Jehovah’s Witness by saying, “My father died a month ago at the age of ninety-three. Every day of his life he dined on a bottle of port and a cigar and I can tell you that, dead a week, he looked better than you do today”.