I know that on the grand scale of Passion and Death Lenten sacrifices it doesn't sound like much of a personal scourging, but when you suddenly find yourself in the grip of an unexpected addiction, then breaking the cycle of destruction is always a painful business, even if the offending substance seems white and blameless (or seedless, as the case may be).

I suppose I realised I had a problem when I started buying them in different shops so that my regular purveyor of fruit and veg wouldn't know how many I was consuming. Still, I persevered with my natural sugar high, kidding myself that I could handle it . . . that something that ticked so many good-for-you boxes couldn't really be a cause for concern. I started eating them after lunch, then I started picking a few off the stem before lunch and latterly, I have simply had them for lunch. I know this all sounds a bit silly, but when I admit that I was eating almost a pound of grapes a day, it should wipe the sugary smile off your face. So they've had to go.

I actually quit last week, so that if there were lapses, they would fall outside of Lent and I wouldn't go to hell for them. I can honestly report that it has almost killed me to pass the vegetable shop every day with its lovely, pouting little grapes on display outside (oh cruel fate! ). They're even on special, at just 1.29 a pound.

Given that I will bulk-buy food I hate simply because it was on special, this has offered temptation almost beyond endurance.

In a neighbour's house for coffee, I tried to avert my eyes from the lovely punnet on her windowsill and in Inchydoney last weekend, I made a real effort to avoid the succulent grapes of wrath in the fruit salad.

I'll admit I've used raisins over the past weeks. The grape addict's methadone, the raisins have brought some small consolation and helped with the afterlunch sugar lull, but it's not the same. And so far, I haven't eaten a pound of them in a single sitting. But there's a long old Lent stretching out ahead of us.

Although I started my purge a little ahead of Ash Wednesday, you'll note that I'm not operating Flexi-Lent, a fairly modern phenomenon that has become hugely popular amongst my peers.

Flexi-Lent, lest you be old or heathen, is a way of completing a Lenten observance by adding extra days onto its beginning or end in order to run amok on other days in between.

A friend from London, for example, is giving up drink but allowing himself one day a week on which to drink. He tried to swear off it completely once but found he couldn't work for thinking about the drink, so now he has a day a week of merriment. But this year, when he wrote down all the Lenten sporting fixtures he needed to drink at, he discovered that they amounted to more than his allocated six days of boozing. So he started Lent a fortnight early, operating a sort of credit system to earn the extra days required.

My neighbours, meanwhile, are going on holidays for a week during Lent and so they too kicked off the purging business a week early.

I've also known a particularly welltravelled penitent to operate a Lenten observance that only applied in this country . . . giving her plenty of guilt-free scope to drink her head off in foreign capitals under the guise of doing business there.

I blame St Patrick's Day, of course. The long-observed rule that Lenten sacrifices are suspended for Paddy's Day (is that actually written down? Did a pope sanction it? ) has instilled a laissez-faire attitude in the Irish Lenten experience.

Well, I'm as a la carte as the next Catholic, but I can't help feeling that Lent should mean Lent.

After all, there's no record in the gospels of Jesus slipping home every few days during his 40 days in the desert in order to have a skinful and a few chocolate biscuits. Admittedly, his grape intake is unrecorded, but you know, even if they were on special, I'll bet he was able to walk on by. God, give me strength.

Facing the truth Indulging at Inchydoney last weekend, I experienced my very first facial. Once the therapist had recovered from the shock of meeting someone who'd clocked up almost 40 summers without ever having a professional pummelling, she got down to some sublime rubbing, wiping and exfoliating with the ultimate aim . . . as promised in the brochure . . . of making me look younger. An hour later, I looked exactly the same but smelt slightly better.

The following morning, two new wrinkles made their debut on my face and a blood vessel burst in my eye. After working out that the facial cost exactly the same as my entire bodyweight in grapes, I arrived home looking approximately 20 years older and with the evidence of back-toback fried breakfasts pouring over my waistband. I haven't quite got the hang of these spa weekends. But after meandering along the winding roads around Baltimore on a sunny Saturday afternoon while Dublin was burning (now there's an alibi), it occurred to me that the effort is really worth persevering with.