WOMAN ON THE VERGE: Why are people taking the Good out of Friday?

There’s a very different attitude in some quarters to Good Friday these days. Your columnist likes an Easter egg as much – more! – than the next person, but thinks that the  day of fasting and abstinence still has its place.

GOOD Friday is one of my favourite days of the year. I love a bit of suffering so it’s right up my alley. In fact I’m one of those people, probably very much in the minority, who regret the change in the law which meant that since 2018 pubs and shops are allowed to serve alcohol on the religious holiday.

Say cheese. Good-looking inspired old best friends smiling and sitting together at the table and drinking wine and one woman taking a selfie.

Now, funnily enough, if someone suggested dropping the fact that it’s a day of fasting, I’d be fully on board. Why? Because that way you could serve up liver or a big dish of tripe and increase the misery 10-fold at dinner time of course!

Anyway, my husband and some of his friends have now actually started a new tradition of meeting up and going out on Good Friday and having ... FUN! I know! What’s that about?

What’s wrong with sticking to the old traditions, I huff, as he heads out the door to enjoy a lovely meal out. I’m thinking specifically of the Good Friday salad, for example. It was a tragic looking cold plate comprising mainly beetroot, lettuce, and hard-boiled eggs, with extra beetroot on the side.

It was usually prepared before the family headed to the afternoon devotions and covered in clingfilm. The devotions typically lasted around five hours so the cold plate was more like a tepid plate by the time you got home starving and light-headed, having had nothing but a hot cross bun since morning, but with no other options it was consumed with gusto.

Besides, getting some sustenance on board was absolutely necessary for the next Good Friday tradition: settling in to watch the RTÉ film of the day which was always the story of the crucifixion and the resurrection, with no gory details (or any detail at all) spared. This typically lasted around six hours which meant you’d be half hallucinating by the time the credits finally rolled. And sure, there was nothing else for it, then, but to head to bed half starving, even if it was only 7.30pm ... but I loved it!

It’s the rituals associated with the day that I enjoy the most. It somehow got me thinking about those pilgrimages on Lough Derg. I’m strangely drawn to trying one out.

I looked up the website and saw that their traditional three-day pilgrimage is a programme of prayer, fasting (just one simple meal each day – but if someone else is making it, that’s a bonus in my mind!), walking bare-footed and undertaking a 24-hour vigil.

‘Without shoes and sleep and with little food, pilgrims are confronted with the essential aspects of life, an experience which can enable them to discover their hidden strengths and rediscover what really matters in life.

‘Many people find that their pilgrimage to Lough Derg helps them to deal better with life’s ordinary struggle,’ reads the description on the website.

Intriguing! I think I’d manage the fasting ok, but staying awake would be a problem for me. I’ll get through Good Friday first and see how I go.

There’s also the issue of an Easter Egg mountain in my kitchen that’s growing bigger every day, to deal with. I don’t want to be a complete killjoy but I’m in agreement with HSE clinical lead on obesity Professor Donal O’Shea who recently said that one egg per child was enough.

No more than myself, smallies aren’t great on the old self-control and while they will promise to space all the treats out over the holidays, we all know that will never happen. ‘If you’re high on ultra-processed food as a child, your palate will reject broccoli, your palate will reject the whole foods that contain the vitamins and minerals that you need to grow healthily,’ said Prof O’Shea in a recent interview. I mightn’t bother with the broccoli so, on Easter Sunday. Or Monday either.

I told myself I wasn’t going to talk about the weather this week but I know you want me to, so I will. The almost constant grey skies and mix of drizzle and downpours has even got me, a committed home body, wondering what it would be like to up sticks and move to Australia. It’s not even that I want sunshine and heat all the time, I don’t, but what I do want are proper seasons – in other words some reassurance that we’ll turn a corner soon.

Whatever about surviving a damp and dreary Easter holidays, I think parents and guardians are already in dread of it playing out the same way for the summer break.

And just in case my nerves weren’t completely frazzled, we’ve got new noisy neighbours – a gang of crows (a murder of crows is the proper collective noun for them, which is apt as it’s what I feel like doing to them most of the time).

The racket they make morning, noon and night is unreal and while I applaud their hard work and dexterity as they never stop with the nest building, I just wish that they could do it someplace else.

Now, last week I had a little swipe at Kate Middleton so, like many others, I  was feeling more than a little sheepish when she made her statement explaining her absence from the public eye. Mea culpa, and further proof if we needed it that none of us has a clue what’s going on in anyone’s life and that sometimes the best thing to say is absolutely nothing.

This week’s small screen recommendations are more about what not to watch, than what to watch.

I was mainly trawling the RTÉ player and gave mini-series For Her Sins a go – it was awful. I also watched The Inheritance – absolutely awful and Heat – so undeniably awful that I abandoned it midway through the second episode, having already had a good snooze.

Probably the only thing worth watching at the moment is the weather forecast to make sure the Easter Bunny gets to visit. Just remember, though, one egg only ... or hold the broccoli for a day or two!