Almost every week brings a "time of year again" moment.

First cuckoo of spring!

First bikini in the shops!

First Adam Hart Davis advert about filling in your tax return!

Not a week goes by without some seasonal milestone reminding us of time's perpetually ticking hands and the general transience of our overstuffed little lives.

They're showing another series of Lost?

Kerry Katona has had four more children while I was putting the bins out?

You see what I mean.

This week's "time of year again" is going to be in a more traditional vein.

One governed by the time-old authorities of the Church of England calendar and Jif squeezy lemon juice.

It is Lent.

It has been for a day already, and I bet you've forgotten, haven't you?
You may still be scraping batter off the ceiling after Uncle Boris' over-zealous flipping display, but that's no excuse.

Put down that Lard-o-Treat and behave yourself.

Most people don't do Lent any more, in the same way nobody takes their hat off when hearses drive by, or buys Fisherman's Friend, or remembers exactly what the functional purpose of a doily is.

Surprisingly enough, I have my own theories on the sad demise of these bastions of British culture.

Nobody takes their hat off any more because a) hardly anyone wears hats any more and b) those who do are using them to conceal an alarming unwashed hedge of hangover hair on their way to the corner shop for fry-up supplies, and wish not to act disrespectfully to the dead by exposing the sight publicly at such a poignant moment.

Nobody buys Fisherman's Friend because, firstly, Fisherman's Friend are disgusting, and secondly because we are all now inherently distrustful of foodstuffs that come in paper packaging.

Fishermen could never really take them to sea because they'd get damp and turn to mush, so that's a lie.

And nobody knows the function of a doily because they don't have one.

In the same way Oscar Wilde believed "all art is useless", so doilies are made purely to look pretty and serve no purpose in anybody's lives.

They are the Kelly Brook of kitchenware.

However, among my friends Lent has always been taken surprisingly seriously.

It dates back to our Davison school days.

I'd like to think maybe we thrived on the virtuous buzz of maintaining abstinence in a world of hedonistic teenage over-indulgence – but the truth is we were just mercilessly competitive in the way only girls spending eight hours a day wearing navy pleats and wielding hockey sticks can be.

We liked to displace the energy we should have been expending on our year nine geography projects into vicious sabotage plots, watching smugly as each other girl in turn reached breaking point, snapped like an old Twix and dived headfirst into the vending machine.

It was out of Lent that one of our most long-standing arguments of all time was born.

It's an eternal debate that has plagued mankind for centuries, started pub brawls and pushed friendships to their very limits.

Namely: Do Mini Cheddars count as crisps?
The debate raged routinely, at least one lunchtime a week for four years, and ceasefire has only been reached in recent times by us all packing off to uni in disparate reaches of the country and not being able to afford cheesy snack items on our student overdrafts anyway.

My stance, which I intend to have emblazoned across my tombstone unless McVities issue an official statement before I expire, is this: of course they are ruddy crisps.

Yes, they may sell themselves as "baked snack biscuits", but they are clearly just crisps with ideas above their station.

Next week – why Jaffa Cakes are cakes not biscuits.