Pancake day is the most overrated day of the year

It always falls a bit flat


I’ve never been a fan of pancake day. Nobody really knows why we celebrate it, it’s something to do with starting lent on Ash Wednesday and wanting a bit of a feast though, apparently. My question is why, if we’re looking for a feast, do we choose to eat one of the most boring foods in the world?

Every Shrove Tuesday my Twitter timeline is filled with tweets about whose favourite filling is what, my Snapchat is inundated with monotonous stories and my days are spent listening to people go on and on and on about how much they love pancakes. “I’m so full, I ate seven pancakes this morning” my friends boast, “tell me about it haha, I had 19” another chimes in. People’s love for pancakes becomes the only talking point of the day and nobody’s content until they’ve forced more batter down their throats than anyone else.

But this obsession with pancakes is suspicious: why if everyone loves them so much, do we only eat them one day in the year? If you’re genuinely as obsessed as you make out with a combination of milk, eggs and flour then why not combine them once a week, once a day, every meal time? They’re hardly difficult to make so why, for just one random day before one random Christian festival none of us genuinely care about, do we decide to eat the stuff? The reason is surely we don’t like them as much as we claim to. A quick peruse of Snapchat shows me an ugly bland circle slathered in maple syrup, chocolate or sugar. If pancakes were actually that great you wouldn’t have to do that.

Oh fuck off

My point therefore is that we don’t like pancakes, we like sugar. Why don’t we just sack the whole thing and call it what it is, something like shrove sugarday but maybe with more of a ring. Or better still, just dump the whole thing and resign it to history. Perhaps in a couple of hundred years kids with hover boards – proper ones like in Back to the Future – will sit in virtual classrooms with virtual teachers and laugh about the morons of the 21st century who rejoiced at the prospect of eating a combo of the three most basic and boring ingredients the world’s ever seen.

I don’t think this is just my opinion, it’s just that other people are too afraid to admit it. The societal pressure to enjoy pancakes is comparable to boys enjoying football or not being a Tory at uni. People know it’s not worth the hassle of admitting it so they keep it to themselves. They don’t want to be bombarded with questions about whether they’ve tried their pancakes with this and that, with tags on foodie Instagrams and callous looks from their peers.

It’s flipping ridiculous

But to those people, take solace in the fact that, deep down, everyone is thinking the same. Everyone knows pancakes are boring and there’s a reason they only get eaten once a year. Everyone knows there’s a reason we have to throw heaps of the sweet stuff on top of them. Everyone knows it’s an overrated waste of time. Stay strong, it’ll all be over tomorrow.