The pious among my readers will no doubt be aware that Lent will soon be upon us. Here are 100 ideas for how to have a successful and most fruitful season of penance.

1. Give up meat
2. Give up chocolate
3. Give up alcohol
4. Give up social media
5. Give up being a social media influencer
6. Give up films
7. Give up naughty films
8. Give up films that are very naughty but not the ones that are naughty while also being either smart or funny or historically dramatic in a passingly educational sort of way
9. Give up comic books
10. Give up music
11. Give up secular music
12. Give up Christian praise and worship music (for the love of God and all that is holy)
13. Give up lobster, though not on Fridays
14. Give up dairy
15. Give up various soft cheeses
16. Give up all cheeses from Poitou-Charente but not anywhere else in France
17. Give up Netflix
18. Give up “Netflix”
19. Give up petting zoos
20. Give up marsupials
21. Give up giraffes of any kind
22. Give up your ignorance of the various kinds of giraffe
23. Give up spy novels
24. Give up surprising all of your friends by suddenly screaming at them, apropos of nothing, “No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die!”
25. Give up your longstanding telenovela addiction
26. Give up trying to learn Portuguese in favor of Esperanto
27. Give up learning Esperanto
28. Give up reading the poetry of William McGonagall, the Apollo of Dundee
29. Give up the various birds, stuffed and otherwise, that you are hoarding in your attic and basement
30. Give up your deeply-rooted habit of eating little fragments of ceramic statues
31. Give up your swimming lessons
32. Give up your avoidance of Luton, Slough, and Swindon
33. Give up the American news cycle
34. Give up the Busby Berkeley marathons you play in your living room every Friday evening
35. Give up pretending you are, in fact, the reincarnation of Senhor Doutor Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira
36. Give up whining
37. Give up long walks in the park
38. Give up spitting in public
39. Give up gossip
40. Give up gossip about me, please
41. Give up your general wanton demeanor and frowsy mien
42. Give up the chips
43. Give up all professional sports
44. Give up your various simultaneous affairs with the members of the Swazi National Curling Team
45. Give up the ghost
46. Give up your collection of Rococo snuff boxes depicting various prince-bishops in ermine
47. Give up practicing the kazoo at inappropriate hours of the night
48. Give up Morris dancing
49. Give up peanut butter and eel jelly sandwiches
50. Give up your place in line
51. Give up the furious Mah-Jong tournaments you regularly host for gangs of aged nuns
52. Give up reciting the poetry of William McGonagall, Bard of Dundee
53. Give up your participation in the capitalist system enslaving us all
54. Give up toast
55. Give up the secret alien knowledge you acquired through highly illegal methods of infiltrating government files
56. Give up felonies in general
57. Give up all the Skittles you have hoarded in your closet
58. Give up the various coffee table books of early brutalist architecture that you have received from work colleagues, many of whom have since passed on
59. Give up on modern architecture in toto
60. Give up writing emoji haikus
61. Give up your shoegaze band, Emoji Haiku
62. Give up on romance
63. Give up on romantic comedies
64. Give up those trashy bodice-rippers they sell in the supermarket book aisle (you know the ones)
65. Give up your seat in the Académie française
66. Give up your seat on the train to Timbuktu
67. Give up your seat on the Parish Council (here’s looking at you, Susan)
68. Give up your operatic emotional troubles
69. Give up addressing everyone in song
70. Give up asserting that you are, in fact, Madama Butterfly
71. Give up counting time in anything but the Mayan calendar
72. Give up your general estrangement from Mesoamerican culture
73. Give up your allergies
74. Give up your obstinate refusal to learn the Sasquatch language
75. Give up your unreliable narration
76. Give up your postmodern metairony
77. Give up your Twitter account
78. Give up treating your dogs like children
79. Give up treating your children like dogs
80. Give up treating your children better than your cats
81. Give up your claim to the long-defunct throne of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth
82. Give up your alarming habit of musical flatulence
83. Give up your covert addiction to locomotive erotica
84. Give up your understated unibrow
85. Give up your long-awaited nose job
86. Give up your embittered attempt to remain Dean of a prominent English Cathedral
87. Give up memorizing the poetry of William McGonagall, the Orpheus of Dundee
88. Give up any expectations of amusement
89. Give up the pipe dream of tenure
90. Give up your position to the various paramilitary forces that are hunting you through the tundra
91. Give up break-dancing in public parks
92. Give up attending Hare Krishna services
93. Give up any association with the Libertarian Party
94. Give up all hope, ye who enter here.
95. Give up the secret recipe
96. Give up the art your late uncle Oswald took from various museums over the course of his long and chequered career as a forger and art thief
97. Give up approximately 1/4 of your bone marrow
98. Give up being lame
99. Give up all the excuses you always make for not keeping your Lenten penance
100. Just give up