Easter. My absolute favourite time of the year. Forget Christmas, and you can keep birthdays - I look forward to Easter from about February every year.
It has all the perks of Christmas - family, food, bank holidays - with none of the drawbacks - endless expense, endless planning, the bleak weather, over-indulging for a fortnight and, when it’s all over, having nothing but January to look forward to.
I think I’ve missed two Easters with my family in 37 years. The tradition goes back to my Dad’s family - my grandfather was a vicar and every year the extended family would all descend on their bungalow in Wiltshire where we’d cram into every nook and cranny (we three would sleep in the attic) and have four days of wholesome family fun. Walks, bunny hunts, Easter gardens, church services and fighting over those miniature Kellogg’s selection boxes.
Later the tradition relocated to my parents’ where the only difference was an inferior church Easter garden and the Kellogg’s selection box being replaced by post-walk skinny chips in the village pub. Admittedly at a slightly different time of day.
So it was with a heavy heart that I approached this Easter. It is increasingly rare that all 13 of us gather in the same place at the same time and, until about a month ago, this was going to be one of those occasions.
I tried to recreate it all on a smaller scale, and as Sundays go it was up there, but I still feel cheated out of a Proper Easter. Still, we had a good go at the key elements of Easter. Church, lamb, bunny hunts. We made the best of the situation but all in all I’m strangely glad it’s over.
For an institution that is struggling to appeal to modern society it seems odd that the Church of England insists on saving all its best bits for one day of the year. The Easter hymns are, to my mind, the very best in the ecclesiastical calendar and a large part of why I love Easter so much. Nothing like belting out a few classics to lift the mood.
This year we had to manage with a karaoke version of the trilogy of favourites via a Zoom service, which our neighbours duly paid us back for with some choice drum and bass a little later. Kudos for that.
I cooked roast lamb, which Bella announced was disgusting, and the Easter bunny visited right before the first rain storm we’ve had in weeks, so it was a pretty damp affair.
Reading this back I do know how much of a brat I sound. People are dying or fighting for their lives, others are lonely, isolated, frightened. And I’m whining about a slight disruption to my diary. Please know I fully appreciate how lucky we are, how easy we’ve got it and how a lot of people would swap their situation for ours. But I miss my folks and I’m going to indulge in a small moan. Seeing at least three of my family members wipe their eyes during our lunch time Zoom got to me a bit too.
However, such was my obsession with missing Easter that I am now vaguely concerned with how I will get through this week. In my head Easter was a big roadblock in all this. Not only was it at the end of the official lockdown time frame (which we all know will be extended, probably more than once) but it was a psychological hurdle I wanted to get over. I wasn’t looking forward to it and felt like once it was over things would be different.
But, of course, they aren’t. It’s just more of the same. Endlessly.
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