Strange how the past is always more perfect in retrospect

Iknow exactly what kind of Easter I want my children to have. They will be staying with family friends in a beautiful, ramshackle house in the countryside. In the morning, they will be woken by the sound of church bells ringing across the valley, calling the faithful to Easter Mass. Trusting in their parents’ religious apathy, they will snuggle deeper into their duvets, the tips of their noses chilled by the morning air.

When they eventually come downstairs, they will find the table laid for breakfast, but with a huge chocolate egg – not too huge, just 1970s huge – occupying each of their plates. Chocolate being a rare treat, they will immediately rip open the cardboard box, peel back the purple foil, and thump a fist onto the egg to crack it apart.

Then, mysteriously, the action will shift to my grandmother’s house, despite her being long dead. Granny will have spent all day hiding tiny chocolate eggs and fluffy nylon chicks around her house and garden. While we – I mean, they – hunt, Grampy will sit silently in his armchair, wreathed in cigarette smoke, doing the crossword, until they find the very last egg hidden in the folds of his newspaper.

In other words, I want them to have my Easters. I also want them to have my Christmases, my birthdays, and my endless summer holidays in which – fact – the Cornish sun always shone. This, I have found, is one of the unexpected sadnesses of parenthood. You are always measuring your efforts against the impossible standards of your own childhood memories.

Not everyone has a good childhood, of course. Yet almost everyone feels some degree of nostalgia for the pleasures of their youth. A child’s heart is so raw and soft that every moment of joy leaves a deep impression: the escalating thump-thumpthump as you roll down a grassy bank, or the lurching thrill of being thrown into the air by strong hands. These are the markers of happiness that we lay down, and reach for ever after. Likewise, family rituals take on the quality of a fundamental, almost religious, truth: this is how it has always been, and always must be.

Selective memory is a powerful force. I know, because it is a statistical certainty that at least half my childhood holidays must have been spent indoors, squabbling with my sister while the rain drummed on the windows. But all I can remember is lying on lawns springy with clover, or leaping from harbour walls into cold black water to escape the summer heat.

Against these carefully-curated memories, how can I measure the happiness of my own children? From an adult perspective, it all looks so different. I see the rain now. I hear my children’s boredom and whining, having long ago forgotten my own. When they fight, it pains me more than it does them. (“Stop! I can’t bear seeing you hurt each other,” I pleaded the other day. “In that case, Mummy,” my youngest son replied sweetly, “why don’t you go into the other room?”)

So I busy myself with the rituals: the big eggs, the little eggs, the fluffy nylon chicks. These modest efforts will, I trust, take root in their imagination – and grow into memories of distant magic.