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A rather idyllic Easter trail, going through the bluebell woods in the next village, in the bright spring sunshine.This is why we moved to the country, right. So I guess this one afternoon makes up for the 364 boring ones. It was a milestone for me.
Last year at Easter I was recovering from chemo and though I got all ready to come out and join the family, I realised that I didn’t have the energy and had to go to bed.
But this year, all better, I was able to go along, so it would have felt special even if everything hadn’t been green and blue and sunny.
The kids both got an Easter egg after I successfully scrambled the anagram from the clues (Hot Cross Bun if you want to go back in time and cheat) and I was disgusted to see that neither box even mentioned Easter. Apart from a tiny sticker on the front and a Happy Easter message on the side. And it being called an Easter egg on the back. Don’t these people know that Jesus died so that the Easter bunny could spring up from the blood-soaked ground beneath his cross? If I ever get crucified so that people in 2000 years can eat loads of confection that doesn’t exist in my culture, then they’d better give the festival name more than three mentions. I’m almost hoping it doesn’t happen now. Ungrateful future mutants.
I got home to find that Liverpool were 3-0 up against Man City at half time in the FA Cup semi final. Noting that City had a player called Jesus, I made a throwaway joke on Twitter
"If Jesus can score 4 goals In the second half I have a great headline for tomorrow’s papers”. Most people seemed to like it but one man in New York (who had seen it RTed by Danny Baker) complained about the unoriginality of this gag. I was surprised at this - whilst I didn’t think I was the first person to notice that Jesus was also the name of a religious figure and didn’t think it was the greatest joke of all time, I still thought it was unlikely that in the time that player had been at the club that Man City had been playing at Easter weekend AND found themselves so far behind at halftime. It was one of those gags that worked due to unlikely circumstances colliding and being the first to notice. Twitter is free and disposable and probably not the kind of place a comedian is going to blast through their A grade material, but I still knew it was an OK gag, even for someone who doesn’t like football that much. I pointed this out and and the guy came back to say that it was still an unoriginal joke, but that a lot of people didn’t like jokes about religion. And there we had it. As so often when someone takes umbrage with a comment on social media, it’s because they think some belief of theirs has been challenged. They will often try and deflect by making out that they are upset about unoriginality or something else, but it’s nearly always because a core belief has been contradicted.
As it happened my joke wasn’t really anything to do with religion. The target was, if anything lazy headline writers - you even had to imagine what they’d go with themselves, my own thought was “Jesus: Back from the Dead” but others suggested things like this one from Ewan Benson, "City win after poor start”. To think that my tweet was offensive to Christianity was a stretch, but I hope that the correspondent doesn’t come across any of my stand up or they will explode.
Ultimately I advised him to turn the other cheek.
It was just a reminder of how most criticism and anger comes with an agenda. The joke was acceptable. It wasn’t one I would ever try on stage, because like most good tweets, it only really worked in the moment.
