Easter Weekend is often slightly weird at any time, Easter Weekend in lockdown, is doubly so.

Easter to Christians is the main festival, indeed focus, of their faith. It used to be that way for me. However, over the years my faith has become Agnosticism. I still hold a fair amount of sympathy for some expressions of Christianity. To others, it means a four-day window to complete a DIY project. It also provides an opportunity to sort out the mess that the garden has become. For football fans the two games over the weekend often decide the outcome of the season.

Easter moves around a lot. The earliest calendar date on which Easter can fall is March 22nd. The latest date is April 25th. With over a calendar month’s difference, the weather can vary greatly as well. This year we have seen wall-to-wall sunshine, with temperatures well into the twenties (Celsius). Other years we have had snow.

Day 18 Friday 10/04/2020 (Good Friday)

My day would normally have focused around AFC Wimbledon’s Good Friday match. This year we should have been playing Sunderland. We may get to play the game sometime, but I am not holding my breath. Instead, after hot cross buns for breakfast, we spent most of the day at the allotment. The B&Q round the corner has opened a mini garden centre on their ground floor. You can buy all the basic essentials for your garden (or allotment) like compost, fertilizer and plum trees. We bought some blueberry bushes and a plum tree as well as some flowers for the garden. We took our lunch and our newly acquired plants up to the allotment. I spent a bit of time fixing the parasol. We needed some shade to sit under while we ate our lunch.

We planted the plum tree and the blueberry bushes. With luck, we may get a plum or two this autumn. However, I am not expecting blueberries until next year at the earliest. Some seeds that we planted earlier are germinating. If nothing else we may be able to live on beetroot and carrots next winter.

Day 19 Saturday 11/04/2020

Somewhere over the last week or so we have managed to find eggs. So, we had scrambled eggs for breakfast. We haven’t really done much in the garden, as opposed to the allotment. Today we thought we should do something. Plant a few flowers, cut the grass, that sort of thing. It was a warm day, the warmest of the year so far. We saw some things yesterday at B&Q, stones and compost that were too heavy to carry home. We took the car round to collect them.

I mowed the front lawn, Diane planted lavender, and refilled the pots. We also filled a gap between the kitchen door and the patio. It was easy to trap a foot in the gap if you weren’t careful. A productive day.

Day 20 Sunday 12/04/2020 (Easter Sunday)

On Shrove Tuesday we eat pancakes. This tradition signifies that the next day is the beginning of Lent. We will be giving up luxuries like eggs and butter for the next 40 days. (Not that I actually did, but never mind). It seemed appropriate to mark the end of Lent by having pancakes for breakfast. (I have since discovered that Lent actually ended yesterday). Chocolate eggs were saved for later. Later we went to the allotment to make sure that everything was watered. The past few days have been exceptionally warm for mid-April. We had a family Zoom meeting in the afternoon. Diane’s grandkids, or at least the boys, may have eaten a bit too much chocolate. One of them appeared to be wearing it rather than eating it. We also decided to have an Easter Egg decorating competition for Easter Monday. We spent the evening producing our entries.