Easter is near; religious or not, are you doing stuff for it?

Thank you, Sturgis, for posting your memories. I enjoyed them thoroughly. As an aside (but in the spirit of renewals), muchos kudos to you for how far you've come in your ability to write since your illness.

The gates of Prior Park Landscape Garden in Bath opened at 10am sharp. Within an hour, four-year-old Dylan and older sister Ciara were happily chomping on chocolate bunnies, having successfully completed an egg hunt. “This is our third hunt this week,” said Ciara, 10. “The others were in our garden. We’re going home to relax now. This one was tough.”

Over the Easter weekend hundreds of children will complete this trail and scores of others at National Trust parks, gardens and houses across England, Wales and Northern Ireland, most blissfully unaware of the furore that preceded them.

The bunny trails hit the headlines when the archbishop of York, Dr John Sentamu, criticised the decision to name the events “The Cadbury Egg Hunts”, missing out the word “Easter”. Theresa May joined the row, interrupting a Middle East tour to express concern as the prime minister, a vicar’s daughter and a member of the National Trust.

Both the National Trust and Cadbury were aghast, arguing that they did respect Easter and used the word frequently on their promotional material.

I hung strands of Mardi Gras beads in my red osier dogwood

In southern Sweden it is supposed to snow to night - Saturday.

Cracking open a large chocolate egg to find nothing in the middle is one of life's perennial disappointments.

Yet for some chocolate firms the fact that most Easter eggs are hollow is more than just disappointing, it's problematic.

"It sounds ridiculous, but there is a lot of air in Easter eggs relative to their value in weight," says Helen Pattinson, co-founder of boutique British chocolate chain Montezuma's.

The oval shape of eggs and the boxes required to keep them intact means that, compared to the amount of space they take up in a shipping container, it is impossible for Montezuma's to charge the end customer enough to make a decent profit.

Foreign sales account for about a fifth of the company's overall sales and for this financial year, ending in May, it expects exports to hit the £1m mark for the first time.

Despite the strong demand from abroad, the firm is yet to send its chocolate eggs overseas.
It is a trend that hasn't escaped the notice of Sean Ramsden, chief executive of Ramsden International.

The family firm specialises in exporting British food overseas and Mr Ramsden says Easter is its busiest period after Christmas.

The awkward shape of chocolate eggs isn't a problem for the company because it supplies a much wider range of products, enabling it to mix Easter eggs with other food orders.

"Easter eggs are a popular UK product and they're very exportable. They [Easter eggs] are not as advanced in other countries," he says.