Eggstravaganza

Easter Monday, 13 April 2020

One of the few things that I know about the failed former leader of the Liberal Democrats, Jo Swinson, other than the almost religious ecstasy that overtook me at the moment of her expulsion from Parliament, was that she made her political name campaigning against the overwrapping of Easter Eggs. It provides an insight into the demented mind of this peculiar woman that, faced with a display of seasonal temptation on the supermarket shelves, her reaction is not one of pleasure or anticipation, but a glowering impulse to name and shame chocolate manufacturers and to put out an “exclusive report” on the Liberal Democrat website.

I weep for Ms Swinson’s children, penned in over Easter in a humanist household and unable to get at their treats until their mother has run over them (the treats that is, not the children) with a pair of calipers and a ruler to find out which has the most abhorrent size to content ratio. I dare say that the worst offending item, rather than being eaten, is smashed to pieces on a wickerwork altar while, in the background, excerpts from Blue Planet play on a continuous loop.

My own Easter has been a lot less dramatic though a pleasing mound of big-boxed eggs has accumulated in my room, desiring to be eaten in that brief period between the end of Lent and when I must fast again later this month for Ramadan. Ms Swinson is, of course, right that they are grossly over-packaged and crassly marketed so as to appeal to the basest slobbering tastes.  But that is not the point. Being of a stoical disposition, rather than the sort of environmental epicurean that she is, I understand that the most important thing in life is not to become heated by such things.  Besides, it is traditional in our part of the country to invite children in from the village so that in return for an hour or so of labour tearing at the cardboard and prising apart plastic, they are rewarded with small slivers of fragmented egg. This year, of course, this ceremony will have to take place in the garden, but it is no less part of the good life for all that.