pancakes of paradise...

How do you like yours?
Dripping with butter and ladled with jam?
Spoonfuls of cream and lots of fruit - the 'one of your 5 a day' option, so healthy?
With scoops of icecream and covered in butterscotch sauce?
Or, Canadian - with bacon and maple syrup?
Maybe all of the above?

It's 'Fat Tuesday'... aka Pancake Day... aka Shrove Tuesday.
A day to celebrate before the start of the penitential period we know as Lent.
As a good Reformed Church of Scotland person, perhaps it is slightly dodgy territory to be wandering into, journeying along the traditional liturgical maps.
On the other hand, I could just claim I am embracing ecumenism.  Truthfully though?
Tch, it's about the pancakes of paradise every time.  I like the idea that we taste a little of paradise before we enter into a season of denial - a strengthening for the journey ahead perhaps.
I also am firmly convinced that there will be pancakes at the banqueting table in heaven, it's in Calvin's Institutes I'm sure I read it in there somewhere.
Alas...this afternoon's jaunt with friend and friend's children to a popular local eating establishment specialising in ice creamy goodness, in pursuit of plates filled with paradise, turned out to be a pre-Lent voyage into the void: they were all out of pancakes.  Sad faces around the table... but chips brought smiles to smaller people whilst I, with stoic heroism, endured a mountainous praline parfait of joy.
It's a sacrifice, but one worth taking....  ;)