Two Visits
17 April

The long Easter weekend has come as a welcome respite this year.

At half way through April, it feels that it is about as late as it can possibly be this year. However, looking back at previous year's of this Journal, I confounded my impressions of Easter as a mostly March event by discovering that early April was much more likely.

I suppose my upsets at work and the dark, cold and snowy weather of March have combined to give a sense that the turn of the seasons and the renewal of Easter have been hard won and a long time coming.

Good Friday morning, Ross and I took an early dart and headed out to Speke Hall. I particularly wanted Ross to see the daffodils along Queens Drive and I was hoping that the cherry blossom trees along Mather Avenue and Menlove Drive would be in full bloom. Sadly, it will be a while before the full effect is achieved but we thought we might do a return trip in a few weeks when the bluebells in Stocktons Wood will be at their height.

Nevertheless, we passed a very pleasant couple of hours mooching around the grounds and taking in a cup of coffee and a piece of cake.

The big event on Saturday was a visit by my parents. We cooked up a nice meal of smoked loin of cod with green beans and new potatoes followed by sticky toffee pudding and custard. Then Ross took an afternoon nap whilst I ushered the aging Ps for a walk along the prom.

The evening brought the return of Dr Who which was good without quite hitting the dizzying heights of last year. But then there were no expectations last year. We also caught up on the last of the current series of Hustle which again is now suffering from comparisons.

Sunday gave us another visit - this time by Ross's parents. The meal for this occasion was shoulder of spring Welsh lamb with parsnip and potato mash, mange tout and broccoli followed by fresh fruit salad and cream. Ross and his folks went off to Southport whilst I soaked in a bath; the reason this being that I had slightly tweaked my lower lumbar region hefting Ross's electric wheelchair into the house that morning.

We settled down in the evening and watched the last of the current series of Time Team - yet another franchise which could do with being pensioned off; it remains watchable without being unmissable.

Monday might have passed with little event but my parents had, a little while ago, alerted us to an exhibition at the Lady Lever Art Gallery on the Wirral comprised of drawings by many of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. We spent an enjoyable couple of hours there with the exhibition and the collection and it made for a good second trip out.

There was lots to enjoy in the drawings and sketches which, on the whole, were a lot freer than the finished works - some of which hand in the Merseyside collection. The portrait above of Jane Morris (William's wife) by Rossetti will show a familiar face to anyone who has seen any Pre-Raphaelite work. Her face is ubiquitous. Three stars and many thanks to mum and dad for the suggestion.

More art ended the day as we settled down to the last of three programmes on BBC2 entitled The Private Life of an Easter Masterpiece. Each fifty minute programme covered a religious masterpiece on an appropriate day of the Easter calendar.

The first film, shown last Thursday, dealt with da Vinci's Last Supper in an unsensational way which further undermined the claims that Mary Magdalene is included in the painting. In a way, the real hero of the story was the painted image itself which has survived despite everything that the world has thrown at it.

We watched the second on Good Friday. The dealt with Dali's extraordinary painting of Christ of St John of the Cross. Gracing the walls of many a student bed-sit in poster form, I saw this face to face in Glasgow some fifteen years ago. It was quite a shock as I didn't realise that it was housed there. Again the programme revealed the strange story of its inception and purchase whilst also passing on scholarship about the construction and composition of the painting itself.

We finished up on Monday with Piero dela Francesca's painting of the resurrection. As the commentary pointed out, this was a bold subject for a painting as it was an event which, until this image, had had no human witnesses. We enjoyed all three programmes and they provided an undoubted highlight to the weekend. Four stars indeed.

They certainly beat the hell out of the radio offerings. Classic FM's Hall of Fame gets drearier each year and Wagner's Ring in a Day on Radio Three held no joy.

Over the course of the extended weekend, I've been mulling over a couple of things that the world has given me over the past few weeks.

The first came from Ian who heard it on Radio One of all places from a DJ who opined that "In life, you can either spend your time avoiding the storms or you can learn how to dance in the rain".

The second came at the end of a very long and satirical email written as an antidote to evangelical health food consciousness. Basically it asked whether, at the end of your life, you wanted to enter the grave as a perfectly toned corpse after a life of sad denial or if you preferred to slide in sideways, a glass of claret in one hand, a hunk of fine stilton in the other, saying "Woohoo, that was a hell of a ride".

Of course, the two are not mutually incompatible and the problem with the hell of a ride is probably the cost to other people and the planet but I could certainly do with a bit more Woohoo in my life at present.