It’s Orthodox Pascha but we’re still in Dublin so we’re celebrating with the Irish Russians. I’m not a great creature of habit but I’ve really missed my usual Holy Week routine. The quiet anticipation of Bridegroom Matins, every evening, Sunday till Wednesday. The messiness of the kitchen on Holy Thursday with eggs to dye, kulich to bake and the annual cholesterol-blowout paskha to make - once the million dollar question, ‘Where did I put the cheesecloth for safe-keeping?’ has been answered.

Then Holy Friday, early to the market to buy flowers for the epitafion and then, for the next forty eight hours we step through time, even me with my size sixes normally planted so firmly in the world. I can’t imagine any atmosphere more intense than the darkened tomb of the waiting church late on Holy Saturday night.

We’ve had some bizarre but wonderful Paschas. There was the year Mr Fitzpatrick was on crutches so we had to do our own thing, including, as I recall, gagging on basilica-strength incense. Note to file: always select incense appropriate to your living space.

And the year our itinerant parish was offered an unused chapel for the night, one of those small Norman gems the Anglican church has going spare. No electricity, nor any other additions more recent than four hundred years, but we managed with candles, and a bucket behind a tree for calls of nature.
But my favourite image is of Father Raphael, a mountain of a man in his festal vestments and an Olympic-standard swinger of the censer, scattering flower-arrangements, icon stands and slow-moving deacons with his three and a half somersault and tuck (degree of difficulty, 4.2) and filling the chapel with the joy of the Resurrection. Christ is risen!

Or as they say in Ireland, Tá Críost éirithe!