The Common Place: Edition Three

Most women arrive at Easter the same way they arrive at everything: slightly unprepared, quietly hopeful, and carrying more than they meant to. It feels compicated and weighted with sweet expectation. The way the long weekend sits there with its unusual permission, no ordinary weekend logic applies, no productivity is expected, the shops kee funny hours and the diary is briefly empty, so most of us fill it with chocolate and family obligation and entirely miss what it is quietly offering.

Which is this: four days at the hinge of the year. Winter releasing its grip with visible reluctance. The light doing something it hasn’t done since October. The body remembering, without being told, that it is animal and seasonal and subject to forces considerably older than any of us.

This week, The Commonplace turns its attention to the Easter that belongs to messy women who have stopped performing spring and started inhabiting it. Who know by now that a long weekend is not a gap in real life but a form of real life in itsef, and that how you choose to fill it is a quiet statement of values. One hundred things. Films worth watching, poems worth reading, recipes worth making, rituals borrowed from cultures that still know how to mark a season, small practical beauty rooted in the belief that how you tend to your house and your body and your attention is a form of philosophy. Some entries are serious. Some are an instruction to eat chocolate and sup wine before anyone else is awake and feel absolutely no remorse about it.

This is not a list for the woman who wants a productive Easter. It is a list for the woman who wants one stuffed with meaning.

The first twenty-five are free, for everyone. The remaining seventy-five are for my paid subscribers, the women who have decided that a weekly act of gathering is worth the small cost of keeping it going. If you would like to come inside, you know where to find the door.

No.3: Easter, the BrocanteHome way

1. Dye eggs using red onion skins simmered for an hour, they will come out the colour of old garnets…

2. When I was a little girl, a new dress for Easter Sunday was almost law. This weekend treat yourself to something that makes you feel fresh and pretty.

3. LISTEN: to Bach’s St Matthew Passion, all of it, (or just the opening chorus), on Good Friday evening

4. BAKE: a Greek tsoureki, the braided Easter bread scented with mastic and mahlab, even if it takes all morning

5. READ: "Let Evening Come" by Jane Kenyon, for Good Friday rather than Sunday. because Kenyon is the poet of the domestic ordinary made sacred, and this one is quietly devastating.

6. READ: Begin Good Friday with The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy and coffee drunk from a bowl. Paris, appetite, female mischief and bad decisions.

7. Blow an egg clean and write one true thing you wish to let go of on its shell, then bury it. Make it an annual ritual.

8. On Saturday head out in search of a good baguette, then spread it thickly with salted Breton butter, and eat it reading something wonderful.

9. Find a yellow gingham anything.

10. Decant your olive oil into a small jug with a sprig of thyme inside. Make a habit of including it at every table for drizzling on bread.

11. Make saffron butter by working a pinch into softened salted butter: scrumptious on new potatoes on Easter Sunday.

12. Plant something in a pot on Good Friday, an old European tradition for strong growth.

13. Arrange dyed eggs in a shallow bowl of dried lavender for a centrepiece that speaks of Spring.

14. Make a lunch of radishes, butter, bread, and soft cheese and read a chapter of French Country Cooking by Mimi Thorisson. Then lose the afternoon dreaming.

15. Wear red on Good Friday as a quiet nod to the old tradition of wearing it in parts of southern Europe.

16. EAT: Source a very good piece of aged Comte and eat it with a pear and nothing else for lunch one day. Teach yourself to appreciate the exquisite, slowly and patiently.

17. Make a warm compress of chamomile tea bags and rest it over your eyes for ten minutes.

18. RITUAL: Learn about the Hungarian locsolkodas, the Easter Monday sprinkling of he womenfolk, and do a tiny version with flower water.

19. Go through your linen cupboard and refold everything, pulling out each piece and shaking before making it neat again: a domestic act with an inexplicably calming effect.

20. Put a small dish of salt near your front door on Good Friday, a purifying household blessing from old German custom.

21. READ: "Won't you celebrate with me" by Lucille Clifton - a woman taking stock of what she has survived and deciding that survival is worth celebrating. Perfect for Easter Sunday.

22. Write a recipe card for a dish you make from memory and decorate the edges with ribbons and Easter eggs.

23. Stir rose harissa into a yoghurt sauce and serve it with whatever roasted vegetable you have. Fragrant bliss.

24. Open a bottle of orange wine and drink a glass before anyone else is awake. Consider it the all grown-up woman’s equivalent of having an Easter egg for breakfast. I won’t tell if you won’t.

25. LISTEN: to Hildegard von Bingen, “A Feather on the Breath of God”, preferably the Gothic Voices recording. Twelfth-century sacred music by a woman who was also a herbalist, a visionary, and an abbess. Perfect for Good Friday.

26. Seek out the Scandinavian paskhäxa, the Easter witch, and make a small paper, twig or spoon version for the windowsill.

27. Layer crumbled chocolate digestives, whipped cream, and grated dark chocolate in a glass for a deconstructed trifle that takes minutes to make but tastes beyond indulgent.

28. Take every book off one shelf, dust the shelf with a cloth wrung out in lavender water, and put them back in a different order.

29.Grate cold dark chocolate over your morning porridge and let it melt slowly into the oats. The Easter Bunny said you are allowed.

30. BAKE: a Finnish mammi, the rye malt pudding eaten at Easter, or at least look up what it tastes like.

31. Paint eggs not like a sensible parent, but like a mildly unstable Symbolist. Gold stars, black swirls, tiny flowers, moon phases, Italianate stripes, little fragments of poetry. Make them objects, not craft.

32. Make a lavender and honey face mask: two tablespoons of honey, five drops of lavender oil, and one of lemon.

33. Do something useful: clear out under the bed and discover what has been accumulating there since Autumn. Then layer the bed with Spring loveliness and have an afternoon nap.

34. LEARN: Read something about the history of Easter eggs, (perhaps the Faberge eggs, or the Ukrainian pysanky), and let yourself fall down a bunny shaped hole.

35. MAKE: Buy generic supermarket Easter Eggs, undress them and re-wrap in clutches of pretty fabric or layers of tissue paper or coloured cellophane, tied with extravagant bows, Italian style.

36. Make your Easter altar look like a collision between an opium den, and a flea market. Black candles, silver eggs, dead roses, feathers, saint cards, a cheap plastic bunny used ironically, a dish of salt, a lipstick, a shard of mirror…

37. WATCH: Celine and Julie Go Boating if you want your Easter weekend lightly dosed with female conspiracy, sweets, loops, and Parisian sorcery.

38. JOURNAL: Write one sentence about how you want to feel by the time this weekend is over, and put it somewhere you will find it on Monday.

39. BAKE: Make madeleine batter on Friday and refrigerate it overnight so Saturday’s High tea is effortless.

40. EAT: A fennel and blood orange salad with shaved parmesan and a very good olive oil for a fragrant starter before your Easter Sunday roast.

41. READ: Define the entire weekend by the reading of something you won’t forget. Let it seep into your memories of Easter this year: maybe something obscure or rare in tone and story like Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino?

42. Remember the dead on Easter. Many spring traditions are braided with memory. Put a flower by a photograph, say a name, light a candle.

43. MAKE: a simple beeswax wrap by ironing beeswax pellets between fabric layers, a useful beautiful thing to mark the weekend.

43. WRITE IT DOWN: “To live is so startling it leaves little time for anything else.”… Emily Dickinson. Decide to make Easter startling?

44. CRAFT: Start a whimsical basket full of “beautiful domestic things” for future rituals: ribbons, candles, napkins, matchbooks, buttons and tiny bells…

45. Make a tiny spring collage from seed packets, lace, old recipes, and flower photographs. Prop it on the mantlepiece and leave it there until it exhausts itself.

46. LISTEN: to Marianne Faithfull’s cracked late voice and light a candle at twilight.on all three days of the holiday. No-one said Easter has to feel sweet…

47. Wear white all weekend long even if it is catastrophically impractical. A white blouse, white cotton pyjamas, a white robe, white socks. Spill nothing. Eat chocolate. Feel pure.

48. Buy tulips in one shocking, excessive block of colour. No tasteful mixed bunches. Thirty yellow tulips. Or cream. Or lipstick-red if you are feeling morally unstable. So lipstick-red it is, mais oui?

49. READ: about the mythological figure of Eostre, the Germanic goddess of dawn who gives Easter its name.

50. Make paper flowers in Spring colours from crepe paper and florist wire like a bohemian aunt in 1971 living in a painted caravan. Go wild. They should look improbable and ludicrously flamboyant. (Which is I rather think a rather fabulous way to live our entire lives?).

51. Get dressed properly on Easter Sunday as though someone you admire were coming to lunch.

52. CRAFT: Spend an hour with old magazines, scissors, glue, and make a spring collage for your wall or notebook. Women, flowers, eggs, saints, lemons, silk, gardens, fragments of longing - all of it.

53. Listen to women singing folk songs while shelling peas or chopping herbs. Let your kitchen become a place where old female knowledge still hums.

54. BAKE: a Spanish torrijas, an eggy bread soaked in warm spiced milk, fried, and dusted with cinnamon sugar. Eat it in complete silence..

55. EAT: Make Easter Sunday lunch aggressively adult. No beige buffet. No child-pleasing compromise. Olives, bitter salad, anchovies, roast lamb or not, red wine, proper coffee, expensive pudding.

56. Choose one scent for the weekend and saturate your memory with it. Orange blossom, lavender, rose, vetiver, fig leaf, incense. Years from now it may drag this exact Easter back by the throat…

57. On Easter Sunday morning, write down three things you want to revive. A room, a friendship, your body, your nerve, your marriage to yourself, your appetite for art, your refusal to live as though this is rehearsal…

58. READ: Colette’s The Vagabond or My Mother’s House with a bowl of sugared almonds beside you. Spring needs women who notice everything and apologise for nothing.

59. READ: Make egg mayonnaise sandwiches and read Laurie Colwin’s Home Cooking because she is the queen of kitchen intimacy.

60. Read one thing about spring folklore. Hares, eggs, fire, wells, processions, lilies, bells, baskets. Easter is a worn patchwork quilt and all the lovelier for it.

61. BAKE: Make zabaglione, syllabub, or some other old dessert with a faintly louche reputation. Easter suits puddings that wobble slightly…

62. Put violets or blossom in small glasses around the house as though you are decorating for invisible aristocrats. Style need not be witnessed to be realƒ.

63. Buy or make one thing of useless beauty. Painted eggs, a paper garland, a tiny drawing, a poem copied onto good paper. Refusing to worship at the altar of utility alone, when whimsy exists.

64. READ: some Anne Carson if you want your spring sharpened into strange, bright pieces. Not all Easter women are daffodil women. Some are flint and honey.

65. READ: Spend one hour with The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady and allow your nervous system to be restored by hedgerows, birds, and exquisite restraint.

66. Make an infusion of chamomile tea, honey, and a little dried lavender and drink it before bed.

67. Make flower ice cubes by freezing borage flowers or viola petals in water for drinks all weekend.

68. Buy a proper bar of French or Italian soap wrapped in paper and use it slowly, ceremonially, with indecent gratitude and religious fervour. The sort of soap that makes the whole bathroom smell like a convent.

68. WATCH: The Long Day Closes for domestic memory, Catholic atmosphere, and rooms steeped in feeling, and voices with accents like mine.

69. Make a simple syrup of rose petals and sugar to stir into sparkling water or prosecco all weekend.

70. CRAFT: Embroider one small Easter thing, a flower, a word, a single running stitch border on a piece of linen or pressed tea-towel.

71. Put violets or blossom in small glasses around the house as though you are decorating for invisible aristocrats. Style need not be witnessed to be real.

72. LISTEN: to Monteverdi Vespers while turning your dining table into a shrine to chocolate eggs, primroses, and silver candlesticks.

73. Rub sweet almond oil into damp arms and legs after a shower, then put on a washed cotton nightdress. Soft skin, cool fabric, no audience required. Heaven is often this stupidly simple.

74. READ: Violette Leduc if you want desire in prose that feels flayed, fevered, and utterly improper for polite Easter company.

75. Promise yourself a spring not of grandiose transformation but of better maintenance, richer pleasures, and steadier beauty. Better soap. Better towels. Better oils. Better novels by the bath. Better hand cream by the sink. Better treatment of the body that has carried you this far. Not because you are trying to become someone else. Because you are finally learning how to live with style inside your own life?

76. Keep a bowl of brown or blue speckled eggs on the kitchen table all weekend. Not hidden in a fridge. On display, symbols and lunch.

77. Bring armfuls of whatever is growing wildly in the garden inside and put it everywhere, on windowsills, in jugs, on the table.

78. Visit a church, chapel, or old graveyard sometime over the weekend. Not necessarily out of piety. But because sometimes stone and silence feel like the stuff of whole life?

79. EAT: Make a spring soup on Good Friday. Watercress, pea, spinach, leek and potato, and sorrel. Serve before the obligatory fish.

80. Take a photograph of the table, flowers, or morning tray each year. Not for social media necessarily. For memory, continuity, and your private archive of a life well-lived.

81. JOURNAL: Write down one grief and one hope on Easter Sunday evening. The weekend can hold both. You can hold both.

82. Keep Easter Monday gentler and more bohemian. Leftovers, long baths, books, films, egg salad, slow walks. A soft landing back into ordinary life.

83. READ: a little of Marina Warner on myth, fairy tale, or the Virgin Mary. Easter becomes richer the moment women’s symbolic history is allowed back in.

84. JOURNAL: Make a notebook page titled “spring fragments” and fill it with lines from poems, titles of films, bits of radio, colours of tulips, and one sentence that feels like private prophecy.

85. Fill the freezer full of hot cross buns and make no apology for it. They do be the stuff of life…

86. Let yourself smell like Spring: buy a teeny bottle of orange blossom water and dab it onto pulse points with a cotton pad.

87. READ: Mrs Caliban. A housewife and her sea-creature lover. Honestly, if that is not one valid midlife Easter mood, I don’t know what is?

88. Buy fresh herbs in pots and line them up on the sill like a small green choir. Basil, thyme, mint, rosemary. A kitchen with herbs always looks happier than one without won’t it?

89. Leave one dyed egg on the windowsill overnight as an old Slavic blessing for the household

90. JOURNAL: Write your own Easter Beatitudes for the empty-nest woman. Blessed are the women with no clean football kits to find. Blessed are the ones who eat the best chocolate themselves. Blessed are the tired and fabulous.

91. Do one practical, old-household task with style. Polish the cutlery, starch the napkins, air the cushions, brush the coat. Small dignities accumulate.

92. JOURNAL: Create an Easter notebook page each year. Menu, flowers, poem, weather, who came, what was said, what you want to repeat. I do believe the domestic archive is one of women’s great lost arts?

93. Press spring flowers between two heavy books to dry for a week or six.

94. Take flowers or cake to a neighbour, friend, or older relative. Modern loneliness is not improved by beautiful tables kept too private?

95. EAT: Make a mint mayonnaise and serve it with a salad of warm potatoes and cucumber curls.

96. Take a proper bath on Holy Saturday night. Old faiths and old households both knew the value of cleansing before feast days.

97. WRITE IT DOWN: “Easter tells us that life is to be interpreted not simply in terms of things but in terms of ideals.” - Charles M. Crowe

98.At the end of Easter Sunday, make yourself a small plate: one or two pieces of the very best chocolate you have left, a few salted almonds, a glass of something red and sit with it in the quiet.

99. Go to bed on Easter Sunday knowing you have lived these days rather than merely passed through them.

100. JOURNAL: Before Easter Monday ends, make yourself a private cultural reliquary of the weekend: the best poem, the sharpest essay, the strangest film, the most beautiful song, the line that bruised you, and the image that stayed. Easter is not just eggs and cake. It is a small annual argument against deadness. Gather your evidence.