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The crowd who joined a wind-blown Good Friday procession in Chester-le-Street may have found the words of their vicar hard to hear, but the Easter message was loud and clear

GOOD Friday, Chester-le-Street, 9.45am. In the town said this week to have the highest level of personal debt in Britain, there are already heavy-laden shoppers clearly intent on adding to the burden.

A proper church columnist would draw deep theological parallels between debt and redemption. This one, more prosaic and probably more profane, merely wonders if this is what Chester means by a red-letter day.

Perhaps two-thirds of the shops are open, even - for the first time - the betting shop. Corals has posters boasting "Good Friday? Better Friday". The pun is weak, the intent egregious.

The charity shops, most of them, have also decided that wherever charity begins, it's not by stopping at home.

The savage amusement arcade winks meretriciously, the shoe shops - Chester has an awful lot of shoe shops - collectively weigh up for size. The paper shop has a contents bill with the message that Cadbury's Creme Eggs are back - they've been away? - the butcher, the baker and the cabinet maker are all open. Julie's Cafe offers a Good Friday special - "fish, chip's and pea's". Another nail.

At Clem's fish shop, they're already preparing for the traditional Good Friday shoal show. Once it was chips with everything, now it appears to be pollock.

The Good Friday feeling is that it's business as usual. The bitter wind that whips down Chester-le-Street main street is clearly the wind of change.

ST Cuthbert's Roman Catholic church, 10.30am. The service is Stations of the Cross, the church overflowing, and some of them not even 40 years old. There may be more people just standing at the back than there'll be all day at the savage amusement arcade (though not, in an hour or so, at Clem's fish shop.) It's an ecumenical service, Chester-le- Street Churches Together, to be followed - after a bit of arm wrestling with the local authority - by a procession of witness through the town centre to what's now called the Civic Heart.

The council wasn't happy, demanded road closures on the Via Dolorosa, finally gave in. "If we'd all been Muslims,"

says a senior Chester churchman, and then seeks anonymity for his effrontery, "they'd have agreed in a flash."

The gathering is reverential, the mood suitably sombre, the church stripped of its symbols and the liturgy moving. The service is led by Fr Peter Carr, wearing the purple of penitence.

Hardly anyone even murmurs before the service. When they do, you could have forecast it. "I doubt," someone says, "that they're going to have been right about that snow."

ROPERY Lane, 11am. Topped and tailed by what formerly were known as Black Marias, the comeand- join-us procession's about to move off. There are more pollisses than Chester on a Saturday night - OK, maybe not quite that many - more stewards than a workmen's club convention.

At the processional head is a huge wooden cross, perhaps 15ft high, which six men are needed to carry. It is doubtless deeply symbolic, but a crane would have been easier.

The procession is both huge and hugely impressive. Someone counts 320, some in wheelchairs, one or two in pushchairs.

Good Friday just another day? Witness Chester-le-Street.

Front Street's even busier now, bystanders seemingly unsure whether to wave, weep, or chuck twopence into a bucket. Had there been buckets (and there aren't), they could have made a small fortune.

"Eeeeh, is it Good Friday?" asks a woman outside the pollock shop. It's tempting to ask her when she supposes Easter to be.

The Civic Heart's at the bottom of the main street - some, apparently, call it the Civic Void - an open space with a most peculiar arch, which looks like it could have been designed by a perverse child with a giant Playdoh set.

On the other side of the arch the weekly market is still set up - dog discs, duvets and other essentials of the season.

The weather's such that one or two stallholders seem already to be repenting of their ways.

As the procession turns into the Civic Heart, the Salvation Army band - the dear old Salvation Army band - plays When I Survey the Wondrous Cross. Well they might.

CIVIC Heart, 11.30am. It's bitterly cold, rain lashing in from the north, snow apparently on the verge of carte blanche. None, not the oldest or most infirm, is deterred, though Fr Carr has swapped the purple of penitence for the black overcoat of necessity.

Kevin Dunne, Chester-le-Street's vicar, says in his short address that the wind, the rain and the cold are nothing compared with what Jesus and his disciples had to endure on that day 2,000 years ago.

The wind buffets his words. The speakers distort his words, but not his message. We sing There is a Green Hill and, of course, When I Survey.

The whole thing's over by 11.50am, with thanks to the polliss and the band and a message, cheeky beggars, from the market men. "They just want to remind you that they're there," says Kevin.

"They're not doing very well."

The cross is carried horizontally back to base, the musicians have chairs in one hand and instruments in the other.

Whatever the wintry weather forecast, Easter offers a brighter horizon. For the moment, it is over.

9:14am Saturday 22nd March 2008

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