I haven't. But the season of abstinence has got me thinking about that internal struggle between satisfying our desires and resisting them.

Whenever the latest figures are published about how we're all drinking too much, someone from Alcohol Concern suggests a pragmatic, but depressing solution – making booze more expensive.

Evidence, say Alcohol Concern, shows people drink more when drink is cheap and readily available. And some supermarkets, they point out, are charging less for beer than for shandy! I'm in two minds about this last bit.

"How dreadful!" thinks one of my minds.
"Which supermarkets?" the other wants to know.

You don't need surveys to appreciate the simple wisdom of Alcohol Concern's advice: We cannot be trusted with our will power alone. If we're to behave in a less greedy manner, we need to impose restrictions on ourselves.

Those of you are giving up something for Lent may have done this by banishing chocolate, alcohol, cheese etc from the house.

Certainly this a method my wife favours whenever she is attacked by her calorie conscience. It's not unheard of for her to buy an entire cake in the morning, eat some of it, and throw the rest of it away in the afternoon, thereby satisfying both the greedy impulse and the self-sacrificing one.

She knows that just having it there will be an invitation to indulge. She's not the only one. In the days when I lived with my parents, my dad conducted an experiment with cheap wine.

He bought a load of different bottles, and anyone who supped one of them was invited to give it marks out of ten and write a short appraisal on a piece of paper stuck to the drinks cupboard door. (Don't tell Alcohol Concern about this, please).

The idea was that at the end of the experiment, we'd all have learned which cheap wines to go for. Needless to say, far more supping of wine went on in that house during the experiment than had done beforehand.

Which brings me to the bottle of absinthe I brought back from our honeymoon in Barcelona.

Absinthe, for those readers too sensible to have become its acquaintance, can be up to 75 per cent alcohol. Vincent van Gogh was said to be under its influence when he hacked off his ear. Alcohol Concern, I should imagine, are not fans.

Since our honeymoon, the absinthe bottle had rested on the kitchen counter, glinting menacingly at me whenever my eye strayed towards it.

I'd begun to feel about my absinthe the way an American householder might feel about the 45 in the bedside drawer – I hoped I'd never need it, but one could never be too sure. Maybe it was better to have it and not need it, than to need it and not have it.

But I took it to a party recently and left it there deliberately. I reasoned – again, like an American gun owner – that on the whole I was safer without it in the house, in case someone in a state of high emotion got hold of it, or in case it fell into "the wrong hands".

As well as the physical removal of harmful food and drink, I have another solution to curtailing of greed: Start abstaining, and before long, you'll feel less greedy. When I was in training for my marathon I gave up cheese and butter, and then lost my taste for them.

We could all, in theory, do the same with anything we like that isn't good for us. But, as that liqueur advert has it, where's the comfort in that?

awolstenholme@ywng.co.uk