Thursday 20 March 2008

holland park women
red faced, wearing camping gear
often with children


Easter is upon us again, and is, as I relentlessly point out to deluded Christians but usually and sadly to no avail, a Pagan festival, celebrating the Feast of the Goddess Estra, which is where the chicks, eggs and rabbits come in. Christians aren’t usually so fond of such potent symbols of fertility.
It is, I suppose, fairly logical that early Christians would seek to base their ‘Easter’ around the existing religion’s festival of rebirth, since the resurrection, symbolically, fits into that slot quite neatly.
Here in Britain, Easter is generally a quiet – and for the most part non-religious – break. We have the Friday and Monday off either side of the weekend which sees many people loading up their cars and heading off somewhere. The Ugly One and I have no plans as such. The Wise Woman of Wigan is coming over on Saturday to take us out for a meal to the Connie Francis Memorial Chinese Restaurant where we will raise a toast to Arthur C Clarke.
Otherwise I will be catching up with ‘Days of Our Lives’. Evil Rolf has fired up the machine which will activate the chip in Hope Brady’s brain, awakening the personality of Princess Gina, international jewel thief.
Meanwhile, Bo Brady’s cousin, Dr Colin Murphy (from Oireland) has arrived in Salem with his fiancée, Elizabeth, who is (and I use term loosely) British. When Dr Colin first arrived he was a chubbyish man with dark curly hair and an accent that migrated from Scotland to Ireland, past India and back via Birmingham. Elizabeth’s accent is even more difficult to pin down. Let’s just say she comes from the Stepford end of Chelsea.
Suddenly, overnight, the Doctor has – without the aid of a Tardis – regenerated into a spunky young spikey-haired man with another accent altogether.
‘What is that accent?’ asked Mary Wesley, enchanted as she is it seems, by fresh blood from abroad.
‘I’m Irish!’ said Dr Colin, ‘but I grew up in Britain and spent a lot of time in Austrarl-ya.’ There was no mention of Gallifrey, but then, no one seems to have noticed the Doctor’s remarkable antipodean make-over. Not even his fiancée, who spends her time whining about how unlike Bond Street the Salem mall is.
To add to the weirdness of it all, John Black’s son Brady, and the opera-singing high school student, Chloe, spent an evening singing and dancing selections from ‘The Sound of Music’ in
Mrs Wesley’s garden.
Salem is indeed, a far more mysterious place than I had previously realised.