SO did you go egg rolling down your local hillside with your pace eggs yesterday? Or did you smash open your chocolate egg and scoff it while you waited for your traditional Easter Day leg of lamb lunch?

They’re a very northern tradition are pace eggs. Heaven forbid, some even say they have their origins over the hill in Lancashire. Although others are quick to point out Yorkshire and Northumberland and all points in between have boiled their fare share of pace eggs over the decades.

The word pace apparently comes from the Latin ‘pacha’ which means Easter. But I wasn’t at all bothered about things like that when I used to help my dad wrap eggs in onion skins before they were lowered into water to hard boil ready for the ritual egg rolling the following morning.

We never tired of seeing how the boiled pace eggs would come out. The swirling, dappled rich golden brown patterns that adorned the shells were created by the positioning of the onion skins, and very beautiful they were too. At least we thought so.

Then come Easter Sunday morning we’d see how far we could roll our eggs without the shells cracking and the one whose egg rolled the greatest distance was declared the winner.

For us, Easter wasn’t just about eggs, pace or chocolate or otherwise. It was also about brand new socks. Ankle ones. For this was when we were allowed to shed our winter knee-highs and gabardine school attire for spanking white brand new short socks, Start-rite sandals (quality fitted children’s shoes since 1792) and school summer dresses.

It was also the time when we were dragged kicking and screaming to the local M&S, BHS or Woolies to get our summer knickers and vests and the frocks we had to wear when we went to see our nanas on Sundays.

We’d stand there pouting with boredom, while mums everywhere held up dresses to your back to see how far they came past the knee. Even a smidgeon above the back of the knee and it was the next size up, for even if it hung off your body like a ridge tent, at least you weren’t flashing your kecks while you were wearing it…

The ritual of new clothes at Easter apparently dates back to the 16th century, if not before, and even gets a mention in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet as well as Samuel Pepys diary more than half a century later.

To not get new garments at Easter was supposed to lead to bad luck, and even if you did get them but chose to wear them before Easter Day, then that was bad luck too. In the 1700s a catchy bit of doggerel was contained in almanacs and went along the lines: “At Easter let your clothes be new, or else be sure you will it rue…”

As for the Easter bonnet that was more of a latter day thing – an American thing naturally. In the days of the great depression to dress up your hat at Easter with a bit of new ribbon or better still, be fortunate enough to get a new bonnet altogether, was a luxury.

The Easter bonnet became fixed in popular culture when Irving Berlin famously set to music the old tradition of parading down New York’s Fifth Avenue from St Patrick’s Cathedral to mark the celebration of Easter.

But funnily enough there wasn’t a pace egg in sight….

 

WILL someone please shut up Katie Hopkins? This vile, poison-tongued, pen-dagger exhibitionist who we first had the misfortune to see on our TV screens on BBC’s The Apprentice back in 2007, is continuing to unleash her nastiness as the election campaign gathers pace.

To make a ‘joke’ about the Holocaust in which she said Ed Miliband could always stick his wife’s head in the oven and turn on the gas defies belief. Especially as Miliband’s parents were refugees from the Holocaust which saw the mass murder of six million Jews and millions of others leading up to and during World War Two.

Google describes Hopkins online as a journalist. To describe her as such is an insult to real journalists who risk their lives and indeed those who have died bringing us information from war and danger zones around the world. It’s also an insult to the thousands of local journalists like those on this newspaper who endeavour to report events in their communities in a balanced and non- partisan way.

Shame on her. For once, where she’s concerned, I’m all for gagging the freedom to speak.