Last updated 13:08, Tuesday, 25 March 2008

Given the choice, I’d rather have daffodils. A spray or two of freesia might be nice; a bunch of bossy-headed tulips, frilly petalled narcissi... but I don’t do chocolate.

That doesn’t make me a bad person, just an Easter junkie without the sugar-rush. Nevertheless, I fear Cumbria’s trying to cure me.

I love Easter. Every part of this glorious springtime festival is adorable. Church bells, Paschal candles, hymn-singing and processions; egg painting, bonnet trimming, first interest in miraculously renewing gardens... how can anyone not welcome it?

Waking to life again after winter’s dark, long haul of daylight starvation is a matchless marvel and one we Easter junkies long for even before Christmas. But it seems this year I’ve been severely hampered by a rare deformity. My chocaholic gene is missing.

That’s an oddity – in Cumbria, anyway. Here the only acceptable teeth are sweet ones. The only way to do Easter is in deliberate state of nausea with a mountain of chocolate eggs.

I’m perplexed. My teeth have been assessed – not by a dentist, I should add – and have been found wanting. The litmus test of local appetite suitability has decreed them nowhere near sweet enough. I’m now undergoing ritual initiation by chocolate force-feeding. They say it’s compulsory – if I’m ever going to be a Cumbrian.

Phase one: Biscuits. More specifically Jaffa Cakes – with chocolate digestives as back-up. Attacked by cultural choc-chip evangelism, there’s no escape. I’m surrounded by sweet-toothed extremists; a hostage to snacking radicalism. In Beirut they used to chain victims to radiators. In Carlisle they enslave you to McVitie’s.

“Recommended by sports nutritionists,” one warder barked menacingly, aiming another Jaffa Cake and threatening to pull the trigger.

“No sports nutritionist I ever knew,” I mumbled in futile resistance. But since it was pointed out I’d probably never known one at all, I was forced to retract. Most humiliating.

“Orange in the middle, see?” chipped in his lieutenant. “One of your five a day. Eat it!”

Determined biscuit pushers have no concept of the qualities of mercy. Particularly when armed with Ginger Creams. They’ll use force, persuasion, cajoling cultish brainwashing. Anything to convert the abstemious to the gorging ways of the calorific devil.

“You’re in Cumbria now. Find your sweet tooth and tuck into a Jammie Dodger – or we’ll make you eat cake!”

These lads are butter crunch soldiers of fortune. They’re militant, munching mercenaries. Maybe they’ve worked downwind from McVitie’s for too long. Perhaps they’ve socialised with the wrong sports nutritionists. But boy they’re fierce!

They deny being thoroughbred Cumbrians, tracing ancestral roots to Lancashire, even Bradford – circa 50 BC – but that could be to hide true identity. From wherever they hail, their sweet-eating mission is relentless.

Ginger nuts and custard creams, shortbreads and Garibaldis, Rich Teas, even Cheddars – shameful favourites, following pathetic surrender – pile on office desks, are renewed every morning to ensnare willing victims. My mother is alarmed.

“You haven’t eaten biscuits since you were 12!” Failure to explain whether she meant age 12 or size 12 didn’t matter since, if memory serves, the two coincided exactly.

Lamely, I could offer only: “It’s different here. They live to enjoy... and insist on sharing.”

So now Easter is here, or near as makes no difference. Good Friday brings solemnity, haddock, hot cross buns and simnel cake... see how easily the food thing kicks in? And on Easter Day, highest, holiest and happiest day in the Christian calendar, chocolate eggs will be lined up for guzzling by every chocaholic in Christendom. Around 75 per cent of them in this county, by my reckoning.

But I don’t do chocolate. For that flaw I apologise to Cumbrian colleagues and friends who appear not to ‘not do’ anything. And for the Easter holiday break that brings brief respite from biscuit bullies, I must be thankful.

It’ll be back to the basics of daffodils and freesia for me, as finally the holiday I most love arrives with promise of walks in fresh country air... and possibly fresher country snow.

Better than Christmas with its forced jollity, gaudy tinsel and coloured lights, Easter is brightest and finest by far. Naturally hopeful, it’s the happy new year marker signalling re-emergence of sun-seeking growth in gardens and fields, hedgerows, fells and dales. With Easter come buds on trees, birds in song and the promise of renewal that wipes winter clean with a brand new start.

It’s the recycling system on which we can rely with absolute certainty and in unquestioning faith. Nature’s magic. Spring.

Whatever the weather, with or without Jaffa Cakes and in an utterly Cumbrian gesture of shared enjoyment, have a truly happy Easter, sweetly filled with chocs if you love them... graced by sunny daffies if you don’t.