For the last decade or so, the law of England has commanded that any shop larger than the local newsagent or petrol station must not open for business on Easter Sunday. The usual exemptions for airports, railway stations, tourist attractions and so on apply, however the prohibition was written into the law as part of the liberalisation of Sunday trading and nobody has seen fit to challenge it since. Enforcements seem to have been few and far between- if for no other reason than few local authorities are going to pay the necessary overtime for officials to ensure that all the tills are silent- but even at ten years’ distance it seems strange if not backward that there was a time within recent memory when the majority of shops were forbidden from opening on Sundays and that the majority of the population reluctantly accepted the situation. The resulting legislation was necessarily a compromise, Tory traditionalists bemoaning the invasion of the "traditional British Sunday" (code for a lie-in, cooked breakfast, gardening or home improvements, television, roast dinner and bed) and Labour taking up the cause of shop workers who might otherwise (or so it was claimed) be forced by unscrupulous retailers to work seven-day weeks. With hindsight, however, it seems eminently sensible that on the one day of the week when people are most likely to be working on their garden or a tricky bit of DIY, the shops which specialise in the equipment to enable them to do so should be able to trade-and what seems to have happened as regards shop staff is that retailers have taken on more sixth-formers and students to work at weekends rather than relying on the goodwill of their existing staff.

To bring things back to Easter, though, one unanticipated side-effect of the ban on trading on Easter Sunday seems to have been the erosion of any spiritual meaning to Good Friday. Browsing in Ronald Hutton’s excellent treasury The Stations of the Sun this morning, not only did I find that the name "Good Friday" is (as I pretty much suspected) a corruption of the German meaning "God’s Friday", but that it was known to the Anglo-Saxons as Long Friday on account of the extended church services taking place on this day. With its characteristic flair for making the significance of Biblical events understandable to all, the Catholic church gradually separated the commemorations of the Crucifixion and the Resurrection so that the Christian would live the three days from the death of Jesus to his resurrection, and thus Good Friday and Easter Sunday gradually separated and developed their own character. For many years in post-Restoration England, Good Friday was along with Christmas Day the only date on the calendar on which all work ceased, however modern retail abhors a vacuum and simply cannot tolerate more than one day over the holiday weekend on which shops cannot trade. For many people, Good Friday is now simply the start of an extended break from work and primarily a chance to stock up the store cupboards ahead of the Easter closedown; there is little or no spiritual significance remaining, which must come as a disappointment to the churches as the Crucifixion is the one point at which Christianity can demand a response from the individual. Jesus submitted himself to torture and death for your sake: what are you going to do about it? It’s no wonder that in ur sanitised and squeamish age, we find it easier to duck the question.

It’s equally true that Easter has always been something of a confused festival, the result of a rather awkward overlaying of the story of the death and resurrection of Jesus (tied by the Biblical accounts to the Jewish Passover) onto the natural spirit of celebration, new life and renewal which emerges in various ways at this time of year. After the solemnity of Good Friday, everything opens up again for Easter Saturday, more or less a normal Saturday, and then back to church again for Easter Sunday and its more celebratory atmosphere. One thing I didn’t realise until I read Hutton was that the tradition of a break from work at Easter goes back to Alfred the Great, and while the Bank Holiday rush to the seaside, country or shopping centres is a more modern phenomenon, there’s also a catalogue of spring-themed traditions associated with the day after Easter Sunday. So there’s considerable potential for celebrating whatever you want to, in your own way. For many, this weekend will simply be a break from work with no specifically religious connotations except the ancient and not particularly subtle symbolism of eggs and rabbits, and while this is simply an admission of what Easter means to most people, it’s difficult not to feel that something has been lost when a date in the calendar is valued simply for being a break from work rather than for its spiritual significance.