After getting home from a very wet walk to the shops I recalled that, by contrast, last year we had a particularly lovely edition of this volatile month. So I looked at last year's April photos, and decided to give some of them the wide treatment, for no better reason than it was something to do on a rainy afternoon. Or rather, an enjoyable way of postponing some other things I really should have been doing instead.
Last year Easter Sunday fell on April 20th, close to its latest possible theoretical date (April 25th), and much later than this year, when it was April 5th. With the result that we were in Wales an entire month earlier this year, so the chances were always that the weather would be rather different.
Apparently the earliest possible date for Easter Sunday is March 22nd, because of the linkage to Passover and thus the lunar calendar: it is determined as the first Sunday after the first full moon that follows the Spring Equinox. That's the "ecclesiastical" equinox, fixed on March 21st, but further complicated by disagreements between the various Christian churches on pretty much every other factor involved in working out the date, the so-called computus paschalis: see Wikipedia. No wonder it's so tricky determining the exact date of the Big Bang: the smart ecclesiastical money has always been on an unspecified Monday morning, which seems about right.
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