Easter

I’ve not been writing much lately. There is a good reason for that. Normal life has been put on hold due to a pandemic of Covid-19/coronavirus, call it what you will. Most of my blogs are travelogs, or at least have something to do with going places, and of course going places is a big no-no at the moment. The UK went into major lockdown less than three weeks ago. It seems far longer than that. However, the temporary ending of freedom of movement is a small price to pay for limiting the effects of this disease and at some time in the future, be it a few weeks or many months, we will be free to discover the world once more. Until then, what can I write about? Well, I could do a long essay on my thoughts about the pandemic. After all, the effects of this disease on the lives of ourselves and our loved ones is just about the only thing we think about at the moment. However, other than this one paragraph, I don’t really want to write about it. I have had my moments of feeling down about the situation but I don’t really want to seem like a victim. We are all victims of the necessary restriction of personal freedom but compared to many other people I’m in a pretty good place to see this situation through. I worry about others of course but have no need to worry about myself. In these crazy times that is a luxury. So COVID-19, that’s all I’m going to say about you for the moment, you bastard.

Well almost. The virus has not only ruined my chance to go places and write about it, it seem to have stymied my (admittedly limited) creativity. I’ve done a couple of Facebook postings about dull stuff that seems to take on a whole new level of excitement at the moment but nothing that’s worth a big blog. I thought about doing some retrospective travel blogs – Chernobyl would be an obvious place to start – but whenever I’ve decided that the time is right to start, something has come up like the need to walk around the garden or have an extra long bath. Perhaps discussing journeys long passed would make me mourn for the ones that aren’t happening. Whatever, I’ve not ruled it out so maybe you’ll get a dose of radioactive travel blog in the not too distant future. Instead, I’m writing this blog on Good Friday, the commencement of the Easter weekend. In some of my previous blogs I’ve commented on the subject of religion so when better than to do it again on the run up to the holiest day in the Christian calendar. Growing up in the 60s and 70s and attending a C of E school I was subject to religious education. I also went to Sunday School for a bit, not because my parents were keen for me to become a good Christian, more that they could get a couple of hours of peace on a Sunday morning. Unsurprisingly I was exposed to the Easter story from a young age. Looking back it didn’t seem to make much sense. There was much talk of crosses, crucifixion and resurrection but in a young mind it was kind of hard to put the bits together and come up with the fact that this was supposedly the most important thing ever. I’m pretty certain I never realised that crucifixion was a form of execution and an extremely cruel one at that until my age had reached double figures. The story that Jesus was missing from the tomb seemed like a magic trick rather than an act of faith and what exactly was the relevance for us some 2000 years later? You didn’t question it though. Teachers taught, badly in this case, and you did as you were told. Sing the hymns, hands together, close your eyes, Father, Son and Holy Ghost (!) Amen. That’s RE over, here’s some sums to do.

You get the story in the end though. Just at the point where you start to question stuff. In a nutshell Jesus claims to be the King of the Jews and vandalises a temple. Some high ranking Jews are naturally pissed off about this and bring him to trial. The court decides he deserves to die and send him to the Roman Governor of Judea, Pontius Pilate for sentencing. Pilate could have let Jesus go but gives in to the baying mob and sends him to be crucified. At Golgotha hill outside Jerusalem he is nailed to the cross and dies in agony a few hours later. His body is taken down from the cross and placed in a tomb. A couple of days later the tomb is empty and a not dead Jesus appears to a number of his followers. Because of all this the human race is saved, which is a nice ending to a grizzly tale. Well, saved for 2000 years or so until the bloody coronavirus gets us all perhaps. Anyway, you can choose what you want to believe. The crucifixion of a bloke called Jesus almost certainly happened but I’m of the opinion that he wasn’t really the son of God and the resurrection was probably a little bit overstated. I’m not quite sure how it spawned the world’s greatest superstition/religion. It must have involved more convincing storytelling down the ages than I got when I was a lad.

Interestingly, the word Easter comes from Oestre, a pagan goddess who gave her name to a month that is more or less equivalent to our April. It’s a time that people have always celebrated new life which is presumably why we have Easter Bunnies – rabbits are notorious reproducers – and eggs. Especially eggs. Chocolate eggs are not exactly harbingers of new life, in fact too many might just hasten the end of one’s existence, but the egg as a symbol of new life is good news for Cadbury’s and the other manufacturers of chocolate treats. That the Christian faith should attach its most holy date to this time of year is a happy coincidence. The crucifixion supposedly took place on the Jewish festival of Passover which celebrates, amongst other things, the first fruits of the year. The date of passover depends on the Jewish Lunar calendar so it tends to shift around a bit. In an attempt to get as close to Passover as they can, Christianity based Easter Day on the first Sunday after the first full moon following the Spring equinox and as such can take place any day between March 22 and April 25. The equinox itself is taken to be March 21, even though it might not be that date depending on where we are in the leap year cycle, and if a Full Moon occurs on the 21st itself it’s going to be a late Easter that year. This year the first Full Moon of the spring took place a couple of days ago which is why Easter day is this coming Sunday, April 12. Exactly 1987 years since the 33 year old Christ rose from the dead. Give or take a year or two.

The thing that fascinates me most about Easter is not that Christ rose from the dead to save us all from our sins. I mean it was very good of him and all that but he didn’t really need to. Nor is it that it spawned a whole belief system that is based purely on faith rather than evidence, though that is an interesting subject in itself. No, it is the fact that we owe our calendar to this event. The passage of time is measured in a number of ways but the most fundamental is the counting of days. Due to the earth’s axial tilt we know how many days it takes the earth to orbit the sun and with that knowledge we can write out a calendar for each time it does. Christianity took a while to kick off big time but three hundred years or so after Christ was nailed to the cross it was getting a foothold in the world and had been adopted by the Roman Emperor Constantine 1. The Council of Nicaia was set up for the Christian bigwigs of the day to thrash things out and no doubt settle a few regional differences. It was there that they decided Christ was both God and the Son of God which is a nifty trick if you can do it. They also came up with a way of determining Easter Day which meant they avoided the embarrassment of asking the Jews as to the date of Passover. This worked well for a while but in as early as the eighth century Bede, the venerable Northumbrian monk, had realised that things were slipping. The problem was the Julian calendar, devised by the romans, was now the basis on which each Easter was based. This treated a year as 365.25 days, meaning three years of 365 days and a leap year of 366. It worked a treat for a while but the actual number of days the earth takes to orbit the sun is 365.2422. Not much of a difference but over the centuries it adds up. Bede worked out the dates, and therefore Easter was three days ahead of what it should have been, in 1200 Roger Bacon reckoned seven or eight. Something had to be done and in 1582 Gregory XIII wad the pope to do it. Not that he would be doing all the complicated calculations himself of course. A doctor called Aloysius Lilius did most of the work. He worked out that a Julian year is about eleven minutes longer than an actual tropical year (the actual time it takes the earth to orbit the sun) which equates to three days every four hundred years.

The solution was to scrub a ten days from the calendar to get things back on track and to then make an amendment to the Julian way of calculating leap years. Here it is: Every year that is divisible by four shall be a leap year except for years that are divisible by 100. These centurial years will also be leap years only if they are also divisible by 400. In other words, 1700, 1800 and 1900, all divisible by 100, were not leap years despite being divisible by four. 2000 was a leap year as it is divisible by four and 400. In a way I find it slightly annoying that 2000 was a leap year. It would have been nice to have an eight year gap between consecutive February 29s. I guess the fact it was the Millennium will have to make up for it. The new calendar was not adopted by all countries at the same time. By the time Britain adopted it they needed to chop eleven days from 1752 to fall in line. Greece only adopted it in 1923, the last predominantly Christian nation to do so. The Greek Orthodox Easter has not been reset though and takes place later than its Western counterpart. As this recalculation of the calendar took place on Pope Gregory XIII’s watch, it is called the Gregorian Calendar. Despite the ingenious way it accounts for the error in the Julian calendar, Gregory’s masterpiece is still not totally accurate. A Gregorian year is 27 seconds too long. This adds up to one day every 3236 years. I wonder if Christianity will still be around in the year 4800 and be getting its knickers in a twist about Easter falling a day early?

Thanks to the book The Calendar by David Ewing Duncan for sparking my interest in this topic. My mum bought it me for Christmas a few years back. I haven’t referred to it in this blog as I’m not sure where it is but it deserves as much credit as Wikipedia which I did reference to get the facts right, or as right as they can be when you use Wikipedia. Have a good Easter everyone. Remember, it will be a better Easter for everyone if you stay at home and stay safe. Just this once, it’s not much to ask for. Protect your own lives and those of key workers. I have a wife and son who are NHS frontline workers so I’d really appreciate it if you stick to the rules. Thanks.