Spring lamb and the bread of affliction: our Zoom seder

This week my son came home from school and asked me if it was true that the Jews killed Jesus. Um, I said. Read the Gospels. Read Hyam Maccoby. Ask your father. My husband is a religious maniac, though Christian. Any patriarchy will do. He insists I pretend to be an ultra-Orthodox Jew for festivals, and finds recipes for weird ceremonial breads. ‘Can’t we make Judaism fun?’ he asks. I reply, aghast: ‘It isn’t supposed to be fun.’ My Judaism is rather Holocaust–centric. I told a family therapist after my parents’ divorce: ‘I lost a father and gained a Shoah.’

Then we buried my husband’s uncle David Watts — not the one in the Kinks song, though he would hint that it was, ignoring supplementary questions on why Ray Davies would write a song about a seed merchant — in a churchyard on a hill in sunlight on Exmoor. He was my most beloved Spectator reader, and the one I wrote restaurant reviews for, because he once weighed my son on agricultural scales, which I thought delightful, and though he was not at all mean, he was careful.