FOR some reason I am currently finding hard to remember, I have given up drink for Lent. No beer, no wine, no spirits, nothing more dangerous to the liver than a small glass of slimline tonic.

I thought it would be rather easy to be honest, but it's turning out to be the equivalent of the Pope giving up mass.

It's not giving up drink itself that's the problem, honest, it's more like the lack of alternatives.

There isn't as far as I'm aware, any soft drink that your stomach can bear for a whole evening.

Try just thinking about downing pint after pint of orange and lemonade or (even the thought makes me shudder) pineapple and grapefruit and you will understand my dilemma.

It's against nature. If God wanted us to drink soft drinks he would have ripped out our taste buds.

I'm not sure they're much better for you anyway than sticking to Guinness. They may not be attacking your liver but frankly with most of them it's like dissolving your teeth in a bathful of acid.

Any why is it that pubs have to make you feel so bad about having soft drinks? I haven't been given a drink with a straw in it since I was about ten years old.

Do I look like a man who needs to drink through a straw.

And yet whenever you ask for a soft drink there it is waiting to clock you in the eye, the reminder that you are having a soft drink.

For the price of them anyway, you might as well drink alcohol. By the time you've finished your healthy soft drink, your friends have only had time to have two short sips on their thick stout.

There's no mileage in it. The sad thing is that you don't always feel like alcohol but you end up drinking because there is no other sensible alternative.

Fortunately I've been saved this year by the intervention of St Patrick's Day. It is a little-known fact outside our family that St Patrick's Day is what you might call the eye of the Lenten hurricane, a period of calm before the horrors of abstinence rain in on you again.

Basically, the Ryan legend has it, you are allowed to indulge as much as you like on St Patrick's Day the very sin you have given up for the rest of Lent.

This seems to me an eminently sensible rule and one that I intend to stick to you.

This week it's back to apple juice, mineral water and other abominations yet to be discovered.

So if you see a forlorn figure in the backroom of one of our pubs somewhere, hunched over a thin-looking liquid leave him in peace.

It'll only be yours truly planning what to give up next year. At the moment, the sensible money is on bovril. I've always hated bovril.