A FEW years ago we received our first Easter card. We didn’t reciprocate. Scrooges, eh? Skinflints? I hope not. We now receive five or six Easter cards and we send two in return. The recipients include the original sender, whose persistence we feel it would be unkind to continue to ignore. The second is a closer friend, whose kind thought can’t be ignored. But there is little pleasure in buying and sending these cards. Just a sense of being drawn, against our will, into another commercial racket.

For Easter, it seems, is now firmly set on the road to becoming a second Christmas. Of course we’ve had chocolate eggs for years. But now there are Easter crackers and even – Lord save us– an Easter Tree. Haven’t you bought yours yet? A John Lewis spokeswoman says: “We’ve done Easter trees and baubles for over five years now and sales continue to climb steadily.” The trade merits John Lewis employing an “Easter buyer” – the aforesaid spokeswoman. As John Lewis sees it the customers are, in the buyer’s words, “investing in Easter as a season to celebrate with the family”. The firm’s enthusiasm is understandable. Less so is the push for a more commercial Easter by the Good Housekeeping Institute. “Easter weekend is a great opportunity to decorate the house,” gushes its spokeswoman. “We are definitely seeing the trend for Easter decoration getting stronger every year. And baubles are a big part of it.”

The business interests behind this exploitation must laugh at the gullibility of the public. Why do we fall for it? Those two cards my wife and I feel obliged to send are a part explanation. But not for the purchase of Easter trees, complete with baubles. As John Lewis and others will no doubt satisfyingly reflect: “Fools and their money are easily parted.”

NOW turned 80 I often find references to the past I have lived through wildly – sometimes hilariously – off beam. There could be few better examples than the suggestion in a letter to The Daily Telegraph of a means to reduce litter from fish-and-chips: “A solution might be to step back to the Fifties and Sixties, when people took their own bowls, along with napkins, to the chippy.”

NO lack of tributes to the stalwart folk, often “senior citizens”, who came through winter’s late blast of heavy snow with flying colours. I praise snowdrops. Twice virtually flattened under a weighty, almost foot-thick blanket of the white stuff that gives them their name, they twice stood up valiantly again, giving a lift to all who saw them. And they are still brightly in bloom, a full two months after they first appeared. Is there a candidate any better qualified to be our nation’s favourite flower?

AMID the last of the snow, at Kildale, near Stokesley, I came across a field full of lambs. The scene perfectly illustrated Philip Larkin’s wonderful poem First Sight, about lambs born in the snow. He pictures them meeting, “a vast unwelcome… a sunless glare.” But awaiting them is, “Earth’s immeasurable surprise” – spring. As he finely puts it: “They could not grasp it if they knew, / What so soon will wake and grow/ Utterly unlike the snow.”