The thrills of Easter grandparenting

Ah, Easter, Easter. The great feast of the Christian year. When the followers of Christ eat chocolate to celebrate his sacrifice to redeem mankind from original sin.

As it happens, this year wasn’t just about chocolate. It seems that rocket ships are part of the Easter festivities too. As apparently are games played with Velcro rackets and Velcro balls that stick to them. At least, judging by what the grandkids found when they went looking in the woods for the gifts left for them there by the Easter Bunny (a curious figure for which, in my admittedly rather cursory reading of the New Testament, I’ve not found any scriptural basis).

Even the date on which said hunt in the woods took place was (how shall I put this?) a little unorthodox. I mean, there was a time when the dating of Easter was the kind of question over which accusations of heresy might fly, in circumstances when such accusations could prove seriously career limiting. Terminally career limiting. 

It seems this isn’t a problem in our times when entertaining grandkids of five (Matilda) and three (Elliott, though he was all but four). Church authorities all agree that, however controversial the actual date might be, Easter would always fall on a Sunday. In 2025, however, that was the day their parents would be taking Matilda and Elliott home. So instead we celebrated Easter Wednesday for which, to say the very least, there is no liturgical authority.

The kids had been with us for some days. We’d been to the woods several times, walking the dogs or just playing hide-and-seek. That’s a game they love, though I have to confess I’m still not convinced that Elliott has fully grasped the notion of ‘hiding’.

Matilda counting for hide-and-seek

Elliott still needs to do some work
on the notion of being ‘hidden’

While in the woods, whenever we reached the place where the Easter Bunny had done its work in previous years, Matilda would explain to me that ‘this is where we’ll be looking for the Easter Eggs’. Indeed, on the Tuesday she even explained to me that it was where we’d be looking for the eggs ‘tomorrow’.

Old traditionalist that I am, I patiently and, I hope, compassionately, explained, ‘no, it can’t be tomorrow. Don’t you mean Sunday?’

‘No, it’s tomorrow. Mummy and Mamama said so.’

Well, I wasn’t going to argue with a decision backed up with the authority of a mother and a Mamama (the usual name for grandmothers in Danielle’s native Alsace) and, indeed, it turned out that Matilda was right. The very next day, the annual mystery repeated itself. Mummy and Mamama disappeared into the woods and, coincidentally, it was during that brief disappearance that the Bunny did its work. They must have been keeping that busy rabbit under close observation because they phoned to tell me its work was done the very moment it was.

Out we went, the eager search party, ready to find treasure. And boy were expectations fulfilled. There was lots of chocolate, most of it apparently Swiss, another one of those curious coincidences because Danielle (Mamama) had been to Switzerland only the previous week. 

Matilda, Elliott and Mamama hunting for Easter eggs
Elliott’s holding the Easter rocket toy

It was there that we also found the rocket toy I mentioned before (in the photo, Elliott’s holding it upside down, a stance with which I imagine Elon Musk would seriously disagree). Not far away was the Velcro racket and ball set. 

The Hello Easter book

Also in the vicinity was an Easter book, with the proud title ‘Hello Easter’ in English, a thoughtful gesture by the Easter bunny, given that the hunt was taking place in Spain. As it happens, Elliott and Matilda are equally at home in Spanish, but we like to think of our family – their family – as being primarily English-speaking, so it was good of the bunny to provide the book in that language.

Max ‘helping’ with the Easter egg hunt

I was also pleased to see that Max, our Podenco dog, got into the mood of things, wandering around with the kids on their search. Although I can’t swear that this actually provided what you could strictly call help, at least in terms of finding eggs or toys, it was a great way of confirming the continued improvement of relations between him and the grandkids. You may remember that when he first joined us, his apparent disquiet with them, sometimes leading to rather sinister growling, had made us wonder whether we could keep him at all. It’s wonderful to see how well they’re all getting on now: Matilda and Elliott have taken to giving Max treats (just for the record, let me quickly add that they give them to Luci and Toffee, the toy poodles, too). They even like to keep Max supplied with food or water, a task they undertake with great dedication. That, you can imagine, is a sure way of winning a dog’s deep attachment.

Matilda providing Max with water

Elliott too has made a friend of Max

Just to wrap up their stay with us, we even took the kids to the beach the day before they left. It was April and a little cold for swimming. Elliott, however, was happy to wander into the water at least up to his knees, as long as he could keep a firm hold of Granddad’s hand. He also returned to his earlier pastime of trying to transfer sand from the beach to the sea as though, like Lewis Carroll’s Walrus and Carpenter, he was inclined to weep ‘to see such quantities of sand’, and felt like them that ‘if this were only swept away, it would be grand’. 

Elliott happy to take to the water
as long as he had hold of a hand

Elliott transferring the beach to the sea

Matilda transferring water to the beach

What’s more, there was a good stiff breeze, and that provided plenty of fun, since we’d brought kites for both grandkids.

Let's go fly a kite: Matilda leads the way

All in all, I’d say, the day went well and provided a fitting conclusion to a highly successful visit.

Sheena (‘Mummy’) has also been
adopted by the dogs (Luci here)

Starmer and the writing on the wall

The trouble with having your back to the wall is that you can’t read the writing on it.

I’m not sure whether the British Primer Minister Keir Starmer and the rest of the Labour Party leadership has its back to the wall or not. Either way, it certainly has trouble reading the writing. For anyone with the eyes to see it, the message was written unambiguously on 1 May, when the far-right Reform UK party won a sweeping victory in local elections and, more worrying still, captured the previously safe Labour parliamentary seat of Runcorn and Helsby in a by-election. Although it won by only six votes, that overturned a previous Labour majority of nearly 15,000.

Keir Starmer (left) and Nigel Farage
Composite photo: Daily Mirror

And what was the message? That the Reform UK leader and demagogue Nigel Farage, a man who demonstrated in the Brexit referendum his happiness to use lies to gain his political objectives, can no longer be casually ruled out as a contender for the position of British Prime Minister. A ghastly prospect that has just taken a big step towards realisation.

Curiously, we’ve recently seen two other elections, one in Canada and the other in Australia, where disgust over the views of the US equivalent of Farage, President Donald Trump, led to huge swings towards parties of the centre left and secured their victories. The Canadian Liberal Party was languishing so low in the polls that commentators were beginning to write its obituary, but the Trump effect saw it sweep back and win a fourth successive term in office. 

The Australian Labor Party was little better off and expected to lose power, but again with the assistance of the aversion Trump has excited, it surged back into office with an increased majority.

Actually, with a landslide victory.

And what did Australian Labor present as a vision for the future? Quoted in the Guardian, Jim Chalmers,  Treasurer (Finance Minister) in Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s government, summed up the difference between the party’s first term and the one just starting:

The best way to think about the difference between our first term and the second term that we won last night [is the] first term was primarily inflation without forgetting productivity, the second term will be primarily productivity without forgetting inflation

There was also talk about housing and student debt.

And what did British Labour put front and centre in its reaction to its rather different election results? Immigration. It was going to crack down on people in Britain on student visas who applied for political asylum.

Now, I don’t know how serious a problem those students represent. But I suspect that in the scale of issues Britain faces, it probably doesn’t make the top ten. Does it really matter more than the state of the health service? The problem of homelessness or unaffordable housing? The cuts to social security? High prices? Overcrowded prisons? I haven’t even mentioned the problems in defence and international trade that our betrayal by Farage’s friend Trump has created. And there are many more.

So why did the government focus on immigration? Well, whipping up anti-immigration feeling is central to the campaigning stance of Reform UK. Labour is obsessed with winning back voters who have deserted it for Farage’s party. It has somehow managed to convince itself that persuading those voters to come back to the fold would be best achieved by showing it can treat immigrants with at least the same brutal severity as Farage promises.

Setting aside the dubious morality of rounding in this way on an often vulnerable community and scapegoating it for all our ills, there are some massive practical objections to this thinking.

The first is that far from being an evil, we desperately need immigrants. The whole world is suffering from falling birth rates. One answer, much loved by the far right natalists especially in the US, is to increase the number of children being born (and, incidentally, this would also help advance another prized goal of the far right: rolling back what gains there have been for women by having them return to their supposedly ‘natural’ role of rearing children rather than pursuing careers). 

The trouble with trying to increase birth rates is that it only generates economic benefits twenty years later, when the children reach adulthood. If you want to start filling labour market gaps immediately, you need immigrants. Far from being a problem for the receiving nations, immigration creates difficulties for the nations they leave, which are being drained of their young and dynamic people. It solves population shortages for the nations to which they move.

When it comes to politics rather than economics, harping on about immigration is dangerous. Opposing migrants is the Faragists’ big issue. By talking about it so much, we in Labour ensure that public attention remains focused on the theme that most favours Farage’s party. Churchill once said that a fanatic is someone who can’t change his mind and won’t change the conversation. Turning that notion around, it’s clear that to combat fanaticism, we have to change the conversation. How about talking about housing, healthcare, productivity or growth instead?

In any case, if we’re trying to win back people from Reform UK, why on earth are we trying to do it by suggesting we’re not much different from them? Why would anyone wanting to attack immigration vote for the lite version, the imitation – Labour – when they can vote for the fully caffeinated version, the original – Reform UK?

Perhaps we can focus, like Australian Labor, on the reforms that would actually change the lives of our lost voters for the better. Increased productivity to grow the economy, generate more jobs and improve incomes. More housing to tackle homelessness and make house prices accessible. Rescue the health service. Fix education. Give us proper defence not reliant on Donald Trump.

That approach seems to be working for the Australians. And what we’re doing isn’t working for us. If you doubt it, just take a look at the Runcorn by-election result.

Let’s learn to read the writing on the wall.