I was standing in the shower this morning - well, early afternoon in all honesty - and contemplating my plans for Easter Sunday, and realised that I can�t really remember what I�ve done with myself over Easter for quite a few years now.

I think the answer may be, for at least the last three years, that I ate a lot of chocolate and watched The Bill marathon on UKTV.

Not that there�s anything wrong with that, or with my plans for today which involve eating a lot of chocolate and working on my manuscript as I�m on a tight deadline to submit it to a competition within the next five weeks and I�ve still got a lot of work to do. That�s been my plan for the whole weekend, and the next couple of weekends, and so far it�s been well executed and I�m generally happy with my progress.

But it did bring me to the realisation that the Easter long weekend is defined for me, and perhaps always will be, by about ten years of Easters while I was a kid.

Easters to me mean rainy days in caravan parks, giant chocolate eggs in the shape of chickens having their heads ceremonially chopped off with an axe, and Meat Loaf.

Not meat loaf. Meat Loaf. Paradise by the Dashboard Light and Two Out of Three Aint Bad.

From the time I was four or five until I was about fifteen, four families who knew each other through four of us kids going to kindergarten together, went away caravanning every Easter long weekend. We went to a different place each year, but almost without fail it would rain for at least half of the time and we�d have to trudge through mud to the amenities block to take a shower or go to the bathroom. The kids, between nine and fourteen of us depending on the year, would end up spending the entire weekend in one caravan, and the adults would spend the entire weekend in another.

We�d watch the Royal Children�s Hospital Good Friday Appeal on a portable black & white TV, and we�d listen to Bat Out of Hell and sing along in the theatrical manner that seemed mandatory. When the rain stopped we�d get outside and find a space to kick the football around, the girls fighting to get a kick and sometimes using elbows to achieve our goal. The boys, often badly mismatched in size, would attempt to take speccies, and sooner or later the dads would come out and show everyone how to kick longer than we�d thought possible. One memorable match on a Good Friday wound up with Rob breaking his leg and spending the night in hospital and several months afterwards in a toe to hip cast.

The tradition was set pretty quickly. We�d leave as early as possible on the Thursday night to try and get out of town, but the traffic was a killer no matter when we got on the road. It was the duty of Boofhead and I to sit in the back seat of the Corolla, or later the mini van, among the eskys, the sleeping bags and the picnic baskets and complain most of the way there.

On the way into whatever town we we staying in we�d suss out the fish �n chip shops, the nearest supermarket, and the service times as the Catholic Church. These were three of the most important elements of the weekend, and the only ones that required any planning. We needed to know where to get the Good Friday fish and chips. We needed to know where the supermarket was so that we could battle the crowds to buy eggs, and more importantly bags of smashed eggs, on Saturday, and we needed to know what time we had to be up in order to go to Church on Easter Sunday. All the rest of it we took as it came.

We�d create space between the vans and set up card tables and folding chairs and a barbecue or hot plate. Everyone would return to this spot to sit around and drink cask wine, play cards, and congregate for breakfast lunch and dinner. They�d cook bacon and eggs every morning on the griddle, and barbecue every lunch time. We�d eat off plastic plates and drink out of plastic cups the entire time.

It was a great time, and Mum has photo albums filled with photos of those many Easter treks around Victoria. Most of us kids stopped going when we were about fifteen. When we were old enough to stay home alone, to have jobs and boyfriends and proper study to be doing, when we had other priorities. The parents kept going for a couple of years after I stopped, but I don�t think it was ever quite the same, and eventually it faded away. The parents are still friends though, most of them still live in the same area and still see each other though not nearly as often as they used to when we were growing up. Us kids, even though it was our friendship that started the whole thing, don�t see each other. It must be six or seven years since I�ve seen Rob, and longer for the others. We went on to different schools, totally different lives. I still have a vague idea of what most of them are doing through Mum, but I don�t expect to see them any time soon.

Nevertheless they�ll always be an important part of my life, and when every Easter rolls around - whether I�m off with my current friends or just sitting around watching The Bill - they�ll still always come to mind. Easter will always be those wet weekends with plastic crockery, a portable black & white TV, and friends singing along with Meat Loaf as loud as possible.