EASTER used to be a simple, if dull, time of the year.

Not any more.

It used to mean visiting relatives for big teas with too many cakes.

Or else going for a ‘ride out’ where we’d listen to the Stylistics on a tape the size of the car bonnet for three hours while me and my younger sister fought on the backseat.

We’d call a truce while we sat in a pub car park with a bottle of pop and packet of salt and vinegar crisps each while mum and dad had a quiet drink or two.

There’d be a stop at a playground on the way back and that would be it.

Once we went to stay in a holiday flat in north Wales for the weekend.

It took hours to get there and when we did, the whole of the area was closed for most of the time and wet for the rest.

This meant sitting in an unheated and tiny space, playing with plasticine for four hours and watching a religious epic on TV for another five.

We never did that again.

It would mean sitting around, eating chocolate until I couldn’t face any more.

I’d usually end up feeling a bit light-headed and with one of those pimples on your tongue that hurts way more for its size than any scab on the knee or bruise on the leg from footie.

Now I have to co-ordinate time off with the wife so that one of us can be off to watch over children.

Now I have jobs to be done.

Usually involving ladders, power tools, multiple trips to a hardware shop and pain. And profanities.

I try and avoid road trips where possible.

Partly because of childhood’s mental scars, partly because there are so many poor souls on the roads and motorways, desperately searching for something interesting to do, that I really don’t want to join them in a traffic jam of biblical proportions and end up sitting in a confined space for hours on end without even a religious epic to watch.

If I do have to drive, it is to take children to see THEIR friends.

Somehow, the delights of a car park and a bag of crisps really don’t cut it with today’s younger, slightly more demanding generation.

There’s been a bit of a row recently over the fact that the word ‘Easter’ doesn’t appear on the boxes that contain our ever-shrinking chocolate eggs.

That we’ve forgotten the Christian message of the time.

The National Trust was forced to add the word Easter to its website adverts for egg hunts this weekend after sparking outrage from the Prime Minister and the Archbishop of York.

People complain that Easter has lost its meaning.

For me it has always meant the same thing: a weekend of pain and boring things to do.

If I’m lucky, really lucky, I might find time for some plasticine...