PANCAKE DAY

Well Happy Pancake Day everybody! Yep, it's that time of year when we rush out and stock up on flour, milk, butter, salt and sugar so we can use it all up before Lent starts.

Here's my tip: only flip when you see the bubbles pop.

It does bring out a sort of medieval weirdness though, Shrove Tuesday. There's the forgotten idea of 'shriving' for example...

The idea was that you ambled along to confession and were 'shriven' or absolved from your sins, ready to live a most pious and fat-free Lent. A shriving bell would be rung and off you'd go for some good old shriving.

In fact, the story goes that one woman in Olney in Buckinghamshire, heard the shriving bell while making pancakes, and desperately ran to the church, pan in hand.

Every year since, the housewives of Olney have celebrated by conducting a pancake race through the town, flipping pancakes as they go - first to reach the church and kiss the bellringer is the winner!

We're good at medieval weirdness in this country. What I mean is that we do things without really understanding why, but with the vague notion that we've been doing it since the 1400s and therefore should continue. Whether it's rolling cheeses down a hill or flipping pancakes in the street, we seem to love a little old-fashioned foody fun.

Westminster School in London has an apposite Shrove Tuesday tradition. I read somewhere that the school cook tosses a huge pancake over a bar and the boys scrabble to stuff their faces with pieces of pancake. The boy who gets the largest piece is rewarded with money from the Dean. A lot of them go on to be bankers and politicians, apparently.

Then there's Shrovetide Football where groups of men hurl a stone about a village in a sort of muddy no-rules rugby. No-one knows why.

In Scarborough they do the skipping thing - loads of people use a long skipping rope on the promenade. It goes back hundreds of years but no-one knows to what.

I say stick with pancakes - at least there's a reason, even if most of us have forgotten it. Plus you don't have to go outside in the mud. Pancake Day marks the end of one season and the start of another, using up the excessive fatty things in life and getting ready for something new. That can only be a good thing.

I, for one, will be flipping a few pancakes later. I'm hoping this year, I can avoid the tradition of splattering batter all over my Mum's kitchen. I'd hate to think that in hundreds of years' time, people would be splurging floury-eggy-milky mess everywhere without a clue as to why.