Dear Editor,
Yesterday I tried to buy a marguerite.
Apparently, I am not allowed to. It is against God’s law.
It is legal to buy a marguerite on the anniversary of Jesus Christ’s death on Good Friday. But it is not, on the anniversary of his triumphal rise from the grave. On Easter Sunday.
Under our current Easter Sunday trading laws, no retailers occupying more than 260 square metres of space can open.
As you can see, there are limits on how many hours larger retailers can open every other Sunday. On Easter Sunday, they cannot open at all. God doesn’t much care for the idea.
So garden centres, which tend to be large, cannot open. They lose trade at probably the most busy time of the year, especially when Easter is late, as this year. Everyone flocks to garden centres to buy annuals, as the weather improves.
Except that God will not let them. Those businesses must forego millions in lost trade.
You can open a small haberdashers’ store on Easter Sunday. But not a supermarket, selling much-needed food.
Given the education I had, I know a lot about the Bible. The theological distinction, though, between buying a marguerite on Easter Friday and not buying a marguerite on Easter Sunday, is lost on me. There are bits where lots of things are forbidden. Eating shellfish, eating pork, sleeping with your neighbour’s wife… yes. I get that last one.
Ecclesiastes is particularly grim. “Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher, vanities of vanities. All is vanity.” Yes, OK, we’ll add vanity to eating shellfish.
And there is a lot in about being generally nice to people, in the second series. Which some people seem to have failed to tune into.
But there is nothing about marguerites. Trust me, I have looked.
Why are government rules, in a largely secular society, telling us what we can or cannot do on the probably invented anniversary of a preacher who lived and died two thousand years ago? Or possibly not. Jesus existed, but much about his life was written by the apostles some time after he died and is almost certainly inaccurate.
I have nothing against the Christian church. I believe that in the past couple of centuries it has done a lot of good. The fight against slavery, the rise of non-conformism and its links to the Labour movement … And the idea that a man who was nailed to a tree twenty centuries ago for suggesting we should be behaving better to each other, might have had a point. (With attribution and thanks to Douglas Adams.)
But buying marguerites? My God and Creator, your problem with that would be? Am I damned to an eternity in Hell?
I assume the prohibition on Easter Sunday trading is to give us nothing better to do than to go to church. How’s that one going, then?
Martin Waller
Suffolk
