09:00 Lois and I get back and find an impressive table laid with everybody's chocolate Easter eggs already in place, thanks to the efforts of our daughter Alison, whose family we are currently staying a few days with.
Lois and I venture downstairs in the morning to find
that our daughter Alison has thoughtfully laid out everybody's
chocolate Easter eggs on the table - which is a cheering sight on which to start the day!
10:15 It's now mid-morning. Lois and I , with our daughter Ali and her husband Ed, and son Isaac, have just got ourselves about ready to go off to attend the Easter Sunday service at the local parish church in Headley, Hampshire, the village where the couple live with the 3 teenage children. The other two children, Josie (16) and Rosalind (14) have elected to stay at home this morning to concentrate on revising for their upcoming school and national exams, so fair enough!
Then Ed happens to quickly check his smartphone and he finds that the service started at 10 am and not 10:30 am, as he had believed, so in a quick change of plan, we decide to go instead to the local evangelical Community Church, where the service starts at 10:30 am. This is despite a fear that the service will be a bit on the "happy-clappy" side.
When we arrive and park the car however, Ali changes her mind, fearing that happy-clappy church members may try and "button-hole" her. So she decides to walk home and start preparing the Easter Sunday lunch. The rest of us decide to risk it and go on in - and it turns out that the people who meet there are friendly without being pushy, which is a relief!
Headley Down Community Church - seen here in springtime
The service is certainly "happy-clappy" in style, dominated by religious songs like "Amazing Grace", accompanied by guitars, tambourines etc. And members of the congregation are inclined to shout "Hallelujah" if somebody says something they find inspiring.
There's an interesting slide display at one point, when one of the speakers challenges the congregation to be more courageous in proclaiming their message and speaking out about their faith to friends and neighbours. "Why don't you do it? Are you afraid of rejection?" etc. And later another speaker talks about a campaign they held recently in a local town centre, where he noticed that people crossed the street to avoid getting into conversation with the campaigners.
I suppose the answer is that there's a mismatch going on here. The church-members have a burning desire, and also feel a duty, to spread their faith and joy. The average member of the public in general, however, has perhaps decided they know enough about the message to decide that it's probably not true, but that they're nice, polite people and don't want to get involved with a conversation they're not really interested in, but on the other hand neither do they want to be rude or impolite. So that's the mismatch. That's what I think, anyway, call me an idiot if you like haha!
The service ends around 12 noon. We are a bit worried that some of the church-members may try to buttonhole us at the end of the service and be a bit pushy with their message, but they seem to be quite laid-back in that way, and be just generally nice and friendly people. In any case it's quite a long service - 90 minutes or so - so we have to rush away at the end anyway, so that Ed can help Ali with preparing the Easter Sunday lunch, so once more in our lives, everything turns out all right, and we get away unscathed!
12:15 We arrive back at Ali and Ed's house, and watch some of the preparations for the lunch, before eating it - roast lamb, stuffing, roast potatoes and lots of yummy vegetables.
Ali bring out the Yorkshire puddings
After lunch it's Easter Egg hunt time, and we all go out into the 6.5 acre grounds (not 7.5 acres as I erroneously stated before - my bad!), where Ali has already concealed 105 little eggs. So it's a maximum of 15 per person. The others soon reach their maximum quota, which benefits me, because I'm very much the "back marker" - so they end up finding a few more eggs for me, which is a help: I am the oldest person in the company, after all, and deserve a little respect for that, at least haha!!!!
I decide to produce a portfolio of the photos that represent my own personal "odyssey" to find, or be presented with, my quota of 15 Easter eggs on the hunt.
The above are my best souvenirs of my personal "odyssey" but I've got others, and I may mount a permanent exhibition at some future date - I haven't finally decided yet.
Your views welcome haha!!!
20:00 It turns out to be a "whodunnit" evening on TV. I'm on my own to start with, so I settle down on the couch and watch the first episode of a new "Scandi-noir" series, "Lost: Those Who Kill".
Just the sort of Scandi-noir thriller that I like!
The heroine, police profiler Louise, normally based in Copenhagen, is called in to some little police-station, out in the sticks in the north of Zealand (?), to help the local cops with the mysterious murder of a middle-aged couple, both widowed or divorced, who've just started to get into a relationship with each other. The woman has her throat cut while the man is stabbed randomly dozens of times. There's a broken window in the house, so the local police decide the killer is a local burglar, but the burglar guy stubbornly refuses to confess.
Louise travels up from Copenhagen, and takes about 5 minutes to decide that the police have got the wrong man. The killer wasn't a burglar, she says, because no professional burglar would break a window in that way. And only somebody with a personal grudge would cut a woman's throat. See? Simples, isn't it, when you hear Louise talking. She's a pro, no doubt about that haha!!!!!
There's usually also something going on in the private lives of the detectives in Scandi-noirs. And for some reason police profiler Louise seems to think she's got a stalker, seemingly as a result of a previous investigation that she was involved with.
Well, we'll see !!!!
21:00 Lois, plus Ali and Ed join me for the whodunnit to go to bed on, a little-known Agatha Christie mystery, "Why Didn't They Ask Evans".
The title "Why Didn't They Ask Evans?" are the dying words of somebody who'd fallen, or been pushed off a high cliff just by a golf-course on the Welsh coast.
These dying words puzzle police and other investigators, and at one point a London-based detective asks the question, "Does anybody here know anybody called Evans?", to which the reply comes, "Well, we are in Wales, old chap!" Good point! My mother's name was Evans, and it's a pig of a job trying to research family history if you've only got a name like Evans to play with.
And do you remember that incident back in the Cold War days when a coachload of Welsh village football team players were turned back by guards at the East German border, suspicious because every single member of the team was called Jones? Well, it happened, I can tell you straight!
Tonight's programme is quite a good start to the series, although as usual with first episodes of whodunnits, I lose track of who's who, but Ali and Ed, Rosalind and Isaac will be away tomorrow Monday, visiting their friends near Fareham, so there'll be a chance for me to see it again, hopefully!
Memo to self: I must make some notes next time!!!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzzzzz!!!!!!
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