51�Թ�

Is it getting ready for our return to a shriven world, sadder, smaller but somehow more pure than before?

Then I grab the lever, record myself with a manly fling, and walk out, shriven, to go to work.

The military has been shriven by spending cuts and is still not recovered from the humiliations suffered in Afghanistan and Iraq.

“I swear by heaven, though now I must be shriven for doing so! Therefore come, let us go and together lose our sins.”

I mean the midlife crisis story, in which a man suddenly finds himself shriven of the beliefs that have hitherto defined him.