Easter escape

I wasn’t always driven to escape Easter. In fact for most of my life I positively, even passionately embraced and thoroughly enjoyed Easter as a way of escaping the everyday as much as most of my fellow Australians still do.

For example, my very hard-working daughter still does, and so enthusiastically that she’s gone on a jaunt with friends to a bush camp that’s five hours’ drive from Sydney at the best of times, but who knows how much longer in the bumper-to-bumper Easter traffic.

And my wife also evidently welcomes Easter as a well-earned break, as, despite the exhausting effort of working at two jobs as well as a PhD thesis, she’s somehow summoned-up the energy to accompany her mother on a flying four-day flying visit to Tasmania.

But I can no longer share their delight at the prospect of an extended weekend, Easter or otherwise, as ever since I’ve been deemed too old for regular paid employment, my life has felt pretty much like a weekend without end.

So it feels like fun, or at least a nice change every Friday, and especially yesterday, Good Friday, the eagerly-awaited first day of the long Easter weekend for most of my fellows, to be sitting on my weak end writing this column.

Since I wrote that previous paragraph, however, I have to confess that I’ve weakened a little and abandoned my total Good Friday escape into solitude for the comparative sociality of my favourite Newtown café, Buzzbar.

Which is clearly not buzzing as much as usual, presumably because so many of its customers have, like my family, joined the Easter exodus to elsewhere, or are off in the supermarkets stocking-up with such traditional Easter goodies as chocolate eggs and hot cross buns.

Dual historical significance

Two festive treats that symbolise the apparently dual historical significance of the Easter season. Easter eggs and the bunny that allegedly brings and hides them for children to find are believed by many scholars to be faint remaining traces, or, if you prefer, cultural fossils, of the cults surrounding an ancient European fertility goddess with various names like Ostara and Oestre, the latter recalled today in such terms as ‘oestrus’ and ‘oestrogen’ as well, of course, as Easter...