Pesach and Passover meet up with Easter.

Pesach and Passover meet up with Easter.

The cherry blossom is in full bloom, temperatures are rising by the hour and Britain finds itself once again in the loving embrace of its springtime festivals. Tomorrow marks the first night of the Jewish passover or Pesach and tomorrow Christianity heralds the dawn of Good Friday and Easter. It is the birth of a new season, the emergence of spring from its long, dark wintry hibernation and everything looks decidedly healthier looking, ecstatically more colourful and pleasingly brighter.

Personally tonight is the first night of Pesach where the Jews of the world crack and snap their way through vast quantities of matza and small portions of bitter herbs, charoset and other mouth watering delights, this has to be the right time to look forward rather than backwards. Pesach or Passover is of course a time for families, family gatherings around tables heaving and groaning with food, drink, indulgence and guilty pleasures where the overwhelming emotion has to be one of gentle innocence.

The symbolism and imagery that is now such an essential part of the seder night table is as old as the Bible and the Torah, a memorable tale of Egypt, Moses and the Ten Plagues, escaping slavery and finally tucking into endless boxes of Rakusens matzos. It is about drinking from the cup of Elijah, singing songs with whole hearted fervour and conviction, exchanging happy stories from Pesachs of yesteryear and remembering those who we never stopped loving.

For some of us it is all about the joyous recollections of my parents and grandparents, sitting around a dining room decorated with the crispest white linen cloth and gasping with wonder at the traditional bliss engendered on these happiest of seder nights. I can still see and hear my formidable grandfather chanting, mumbling and muttering his way through this most stirring of Jewish nights, the prayers and blessings recited at breathtaking speed.

It has to be said that my grandfather was the most learned and venerable scholar of Hebrew, a man who was cruelly deprived of an education but still gloried in the richly diverse prose of the Haggadah, the Hebrew prayer book for Pesach. Even now the memories are as amusing and light hearted as they should be. He presided proudly over the seder night table, hurt deeply by the Second World War but nonetheless upbeat, buoyant and full of the joys of Pesach.

To this day I've no idea why he chose to speed read through the whole service without ever thinking for a minute that anybody would ever understand the finer points of the Hebrew in front  of them. It was a whirlwind, record breaking rendition of the Pesach story, a fast and frenetic interpretation of everything that had happened so many hundreds and thousands of years ago.

But then he would lean over towards me with that most knowing of smiles, re-assure us that everything was just as it should be and that whatever he'd chanted carried with it a strong statement of triumphalism and feelgood euphoria. He would point to notable passages in a book by now stained with Palwin's Pesach red wine, a very contented man on this night of leaning and wishing to be nowhere else but with his family and grandchildren.

And then halfway through the Pesach feast my wonderful grandmother would emerge almost relieved from her kitchen cooking duties with that lovely waltz into the living room. She would insist that the cup of Elijah had been drunk from and that the ripple of wind that we could see meant that Elijah had had his yearly drop of booze. It all made perfect sense.

The festival of Pesach this year has fallen on the same weekend as Easter with all of its overtones of eggs, chocolate eggs and rabbits merrily jumping through those lush green acres of the English countryside. Like Pesach, Easter is a time for new seasons,  warmer days, warmer nights, sweet flavours and spices and that overriding sense that this is the time for seizing the day and taking full advantage of new opportunities. It has to be the best of all times. A time to feel good about life and for ever.