Celebrating renewal

Not Bach, or Beethoven, to celebrate the Easter season on Radio Three, but a series of programmes dedicated to Spring. Not that you would have discovered this from the Radio Times, which gave us a few lolloping rabbits and the strangest and most unappetising-looking Easter eggs but nothing to suggest that Radio Three has been making an effort to give some shape and purpose to the daily grind by acknowledging on air the transition from darkest winter to the Rites of Spring. This year’s spring, of course, is playing hooky, and for most of us Easter was colder and whiter than Christmas. It’s all the fault of those bearded clerics back in the 7th century who declared at Whitby that the Easter festival of Redemption and Resurrection should take place in Britain according to the ancient Alexandrian calculation. Suddenly in 2008 we’ve found ourselves at Easter before the clocks have sprung forward and while the earth’s still hard as iron. It’s come uncommonly early, almost you might say supernaturally so, on the same weekend as the vernal equinox and an extraordinarily bright full moon, and suddenly everyone seems to know that it’s all because of the synchronicity between the lunar cycle and the vernal equinox.

Pagan Spring and Christian Easter have come together, as one great festival of renewal, of rebirth, of new shoots appearing out of dry tubers and the song of the nightingale echoing through woods carpeted with timorous violets. Well, almost. The birds may be singing at 4 a.m. and the willow is in full leaf but in the woods at the weekend snow was falling through the trees and there was not a primrose to be seen.

Thank heavens, then, for Radio Three and its determination to celebrate all things vernal, no matter that the temperature outside is colder than in deepest winter.