Easter greetings

Happy Easter, everyone!

Today I've been thinking quite a lot about public holidays and festivals, and what people do with what time off is given to them. The motley crew of us in the house have all been scattered today. Kev, Loic and Nathen have all been (or are about to be) at work. Chris, Tess and Kev's friend Kai (staying with us for a bit) have been recovering from last night's venture to a downtown club; I went to a church service this morning and spent this afternoon vegging and talking to my family on Skype; Quentin is off at a card tournament. Not hugely different from a normal weekend day and quite a different scene from large family gatherings I associate with public holidays and long weekends. Which makes small touches, like the mini egg hunt organised by my boss at work yesterday afternoon, so valuable. She sent us all out of the store for 10 minutes and we spent the rest of the afternoon happily searching for chocolate and occasionally remembering to serve any customers who had the thoughtlessness to wander in and disrupt us.

There has been a distinct lack of chocolate in the house. Up until today when I went and cleaned out the remainder of Safeway's mini egg sachets, and found a couple of chocolate bunnies as well, all we'd managed was an over-sized bag of mini eggs on Friday evening. (I'll put one of my many "life questions" out here: why does chocolate almost always taste better in egg format? Especially mini eggs.) I've also only had about two hot cross buns so far whereas I think that in the first three months of last year, they made up about 70% of my diet. Oh, Sainsbury's 2 packs for 99p offer - how I missed you. Although they're probably at around £2.50 this year.

Another thing that's lacked significantly in our household is any feeling of long weekend holiday. Being on the lower echelons of the employment sector, we're all experiencing working over the bank holiday duties. Something I've had the luxury of not really ever having to do. It's really driven home the fact that really, there isn't much time anymore that's ever completely off. Something is always open. Of course you appreciate this when you can conveniently go get milk on Christmas morning for the bread sauce, but you never really realise what it feels like until you're on the other side of the counter. At my work today, for example, I don't think working hours were any different than normal. And I think it's a bit of a shame. I'm not saying this from any religious standpoint, merely that there doesn't seem to be any opportunity for a dedicated, guaranteed time that everyone has off, which can be spent with loved ones, on holiday, or with a random collection of people that for now is your precious little nucleus of a family. And what was normally a major event (yesss two free days off work, a break from the city, home cooking for four days!) can quite as easily pass by in a drift of card games, afternoon movies and wondering what to cook. Not that I'm unhappy to be here, though. It still feels like a special day in some happy, mysterious way.

Aside from my little musing about time off and being a public holiday orphan, life continues here as normal. Was a bit of a shock to the system to get back from Whistler this week. The rest of the holiday continued to be just as fantastic as the beginning. More adventurous runs including double black bowls full of lovely deep powder and moguls late in the afternoon when we had pretty much the entire mountain to ourselves. It was great to spend time in a family environment, something which I haven't really done much of lately. To add to this, we were joined by Martin family friends from Devon which made for larger groups skiing, and enjoyable dinners every other evening. We also did a day of boarding which was fun. For me it pretty much consisted of going up and down the slopes to make a fairly easy day. What was fun though, was watching Patrick, Q's dad, learn to board and enjoy it so much so that he declared in the evening that (at the age of 60-something) he was from now on converting to snowboarding for good! Georgia and Dave (sister and boyfriend) are also fab and really good company.

Spring is almost here...cherry blossoms are appearing all over the place and we've had some lovely sunny days where we went and played tennis in the park (house outings to parks and sports grounds are becoming fairly common). I've got some spring clothes to start buying (holes have rendered jeans useless and trainers a bad idea when it's wet, which is a good proportion of the time).

Apart from working, not much else planned on the horizon. Maybe a trip to Vancouver Island at some point. These are definitely the settle and work months, during which I can look forward to upcoming visits from family and very dear friends: Becks and Laura at the beginning of July, my brother Dave in August, parents end Aug - start September and Alana in October/November. For now though, I will leave you once again with happy thoughts for the Easter weekend, and hope that you have some chocolate left for tomorrow, and that you all enjoy the bank holiday!

xxx