This week:

Reflecting on faith, Easter and childhood

EASTER is upon us on. This year, it will coincide with the clocks going forward for an hour. This is officially British Summer Time, more widely known as ‘Daylight Saving Time’. Not all clocks across the world behave like this, and not all clocks skipping an hour to welcome the Spring leap forward at the same time.

In North America, people have already been ‘saving daylight’ since March 10.

When first introduced in North America, a wise Native American Chief is said to have remarked: “Only the White Man would believe you could cut a foot off the top of the blanket, sew it onto the bottom of the blanket, and be left with a longer blanket.”

If you live in rural Fermanagh or Tyrone and work on the land all the hours of daylight (and dry weather) God sends, you might agree with him.

He was right, of course. We still have exactly the same amount of daylight each day, but we have longer, light evenings.

Your view on the matter might depend on where you live and how you earn your living, or whether you are a morning lark or a night owl.

Although the idea had been around for some time, the introduction of daylight savings was a side effect of efficiency measures during the 1914-1918 War, and was first introduced in Germany and its allies in 1916, and followed by the opposing allies of Europe and Britain.

What was a war-time measure introduced more than a hundred years ago to save costs and maximise working hours doing still with us as part of our ‘culture and heritage’ today, and we simply accept it as the way we do things? We are a ritualistic species, are we not? The moral of the story is as follows. There is a lot to be said for questioning the how, when and why things came to be, and on continuing as they are. If nothing else, it encourages the mind to remain open to the possibility of them not always staying that way without anyone, of necessity, coming to any real harm.

EASTER was a ritual in our house in what my grandchildren call ‘the olden days’.

The Easter Bunny had not reached these shores, or if it had, it hadn’t crossed the Bann River.

Chocolate was not the order of the day either. Wartime rationing of chocolate only ended in 1953, and it remained a luxury for most of the 1950s.

Easter was preceded by the ritual of Lent – 40 days with no ha’penny chews, no gobstoppers, no four-apenny ‘blackjacks’ or ‘banana splits’, and not even the whiff of a midget gem, and for added character-building, we also went without HP or tomato sauce!

My mother probably saved a quiet fortune on that one.

Lent ended with Midnight Mass, which required fasting. We walked home from the chapel, munching or chewing on