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.