Eostre (maybe)

At least we know that it's Easter Day. The name may, according to Bede, or may not derive from Eostre, the Great Mother Goddess of the Saxon people, and her name was derived from the ancient word for spring. Some sources identify her as the goddess of rabbits and eggs (unlikely!), which brings us to where we are today!

Well, we have a few Easter eggs, and some springlike decorations, not to mention a biscuit with icing to signify a Beezle. Some of the little eggs are Reese Peanut Butter eggs, and were brought by our son from California a few weeks back. These things are not good for us! But I thought the decorations made a photographic concession to the festival, Christian or Pagan.

And where are we today? Is this California, or the South of France? No, the photograph is deceptive: the exotic location is the forecourt of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford!

We dropped in to the museum for our "Sunday Culture". We really came to see a Manet that is on loan to the museum, but, as a chemist, I thought I would show this 'photo I took of a 16th century glass alembic from Iran. I wonder what they distilled with it.

On the subject of Easter eggs, we saw a very jolly Easter-egg hunt in the gardens of St John's College in the early afternoon. The vegetation provided some good places for hiding the booty, and the participants were not children but more like people of undergraduate age (but there shouldn't be any undergraduates here at the moment). Anyway, they were all having a good bit of fun.

We had gone over to St John's from the Ashmolean to see if there was anything of (botanical) interest in the garden. My goodness me, there most certainly was. So much, indeed, that I would clutter up this page with links to my photographs if I showed them that way. Instead, this seems to be another occasion for

· · · a small gallery collection of some lovely flowers.

Happy Easter, all you who read this!