Being Outside More

Today is a bank holiday in the UK, once called the Whitsun bank holiday. One of those little bits of trivia tucked away in the brain that’s never really interrogated. The half-remembered poem by Phillip Larkin, hot weather and wedding parties on a train, vague recollections of working class families visiting the seaside (mainly based on my childhood reading of The Family from One End Street), half-formed images of May queens and girls in white dresses. The things we forget we know. On consultation with my friend Wikipedia I discovered that Whitsun is the seventh Sunday after Easter, and in Christian belief marks “the descent of the holy spirit on Jesus’ disciples” (which sounds vaguely uncomfortable to my heathen ears). The day after Whitsun was known as Whit Monday and was made a bank holiday in 1871, marked for 100 years and then abolished in 1971. The moveable nature of the festival was removed and it was then fixed as the last Monday in May for the more prosaically named Spring Ban...

I have dragged my laptop out into the garden, it is a beautifully blue-skied sunny day, the kind of Easter Monday you hope for but so rarely arrives. My houseplants are having a holiday on the patio in front of me, earlier I topped them up with compost and watered them thoroughly. They are jostled by unexpected breezes, a new reality for them. Inside the house my daughter is planning complicated baking, there are plans for afternoon tea. When I asked the children at work what happens at Easter, I was met with a chorus of “chocolate!”. We are a resolutely secular household, but the break from work and study is welcome. Easter weekend feels like a much more low pressure festival than Christmas, my son is back from university and we’re enjoying having him home. Good food has been eaten and I have performed the traditional ritual of visiting a garden centre and daydreaming in an aisle of seed packets, so much possibility and hope. In ALDI I bought a cheerful strip of bedding plants, jewel ...