Editor-At-Large: The JSP 'Easter Survival Guide'

Happy Easter - or to the 50 per cent of you who have no idea what we're celebrating this weekend - happy holiday! I wasn't that surprised by a recent magazine survey which revealed that half of us don't know that a religious festival honouring something called the Resurrection of Christ takes place between Good Friday and Easter Monday. For most people Easter marks the first real holiday since you got the bills for the last one - Christmas. The clocks went forward last night and summer time began, and with it a whole raft of new leisure activities, personal goals and eating plans. This column is designed as a guide to help the 50 per cent of you who won't be listening to Rowan Williams, singing hymns or rolling Easter eggs down a hillside get through the next 36 hours.

Happy Easter - or to the 50 per cent of you who have no idea what we're celebrating this weekend - happy holiday! I wasn't that surprised by a recent magazine survey which revealed that half of us don't know that a religious festival honouring something called the Resurrection of Christ takes place between Good Friday and Easter Monday. For most people Easter marks the first real holiday since you got the bills for the last one - Christmas. The clocks went forward last night and summer time began, and with it a whole raft of new leisure activities, personal goals and eating plans. This column is designed as a guide to help the 50 per cent of you who won't be listening to Rowan Williams, singing hymns or rolling Easter eggs down a hillside get through the next 36 hours.

Easter is traditionally the first weekend of the year when we get in the car and sit in a traffic jam heading for a theme park, national park, safari park, stately home or national monument. The restoration business is highly competitive and last week English Heritage was quickly off the blocks in its search for your Easter pounds, with the announcement of the opening of Danson House in Bexley Heath, just in time for the Bank Holiday hordes seeking something a bit more uplifting than the nearest Center Parc. This 18th-century Georgian mansion was built by a city merchant and had fallen into such disrepair that it was pronounced London's most "at risk" listed building when English Heritage took it over in 1995. Some £4m has been spent on the project, and now Simon Thurley, its chief executive, has been seriously whingeing about the lack of funds to restore other 18th century villas around London. According to Mr Thurley, Labour has been unreasonably miserly about the money it allocates to restoring old buildings, while grants to sport and the arts have risen substantially.

Meanwhile, the Heritage Lottery Fund has given the National Trust £20m to restore the Victorian gothic mansion Tyntesfield, outside Bristol. Thank goodness Tessa Jowell is no pushover when it comes to coughing up in order to fund endless "at risk" palaces built by the upper middle-classes 200 years ago. Indeed, she made a speech the other day proposing the heretical notion that soon some of these places would be best preserved digitally, so that we can let them fall down and get on with building some challenging contemporary architecture for future generations to remember us by. Hoorah! At last a culture minister not fully signed up to the Simon Thurley school of "if it's Georgian, it's gorgeous and must be saved" school of blinkered thinking. And the sooner Ms Jowell combines our two competing guardians of the past, English Heritage and the National Trust, the better. It might be complicated, but it's got to save on admin, publicity, begging campaigns and public relations. Too bad Ms Jowell is expected to be promoted after the election. She's been surprisingly robust at her job.

If visiting a crumbling building isn't your style, soon you'll be able to combine a visit to a Disney-style theme park with a spot of religion at Easter - won't that be educational for the kids? In case you wondered where the Resurrection actually happened, there's a strong case for suspecting it might have been West Yorkshire. An evangelical Christian has spent £100,000 of her own money setting up a trust to build a theme park, costing more than £140m and based on the bible, sited in Yorkshire. She's asking Christians to donate £144 each during holy week. I can't guarantee that you'll have a plank in the Ark with your name on it, but it's worth a try.

You can forget about driving to the coast in search of an unspoilt spot for a picnic this weekend - the Marine Conservation Society tells us that litter on beaches around Britain has risen by a disgusting 82 per cent over the past 10 years. I walk around the coast of Kent regularly, and once you leave the zone where the litter collectors paid by Whitstable council end their work the detritus really starts. From hypodermic syringes, plastic bottles and oil drums to furniture, the beach around the South Swale Bird sanctuary and Graveney Marshes is a disgrace. Reculver Castle might have been beautifully restored, but try walking along the coast towards Margate. How many carrier bags and discarded tyres can a mile of foreshore accommodate? Instead of saving Simon Thurley's genteel villas, we'd do better to declare our beaches conservation zones and send in the litter collectors, not just where local councils can be bothered. We should start treating our marine environment as the precious (and fragile) asset that it is.

Easter is traditionally the time we visit the local superstore. Can I suggest that you don't bother visiting one owned by the increasingly bonkers Sir Ken Morrison. Having made his name as a bluff, no-nonsense, hands-on Yorkshireman, he made the potentially dangerous move of buying the Safeway chain. Since then the autocratic management style of 73-year-old Sir Ken has come increasingly under attack in the City pages and last week W M Morrison issued their third profits warning in succession. It has been forced to replace the finance director who'd served the company loyally for 31 years. Like all Yorkshiremen, the pig-headed Sir Ken can't contemplate that it might be his fault as directors leave and he fails to rise to meet the challenge from Tesco. Indeed, he told one financial journalist: "We'll run our basic business as we've always run it. We've no plans to tailor it to a middle-class shopper. I don't even know what a middle-class shopper is." Sir Ken might have built his empire in the North, but the Safeway chain was based in the South - my local branch is in the Barbican, London EC1, hardly a deprived area. Thanks to Maggie Thatcher, most of Britain belongs to the home-owning middle-classes, or those who aspire to be. Hasn't Sir Ken heard of Waitrose? We know which supermarket chain we're not welcome at.

Finally, Easter, by tradition at least, is the time when we decide to resume gardening. A spot of sunshine and we're debating whether to install water features or window boxes. Now teak furniture is environmentally unsound, you have to spend your cash on the latest gadgets, and gardening journalists are exactly like beauty writers, always seduced by the well-written press release. They write about plant shredders (yes, I am aware you don't know what they do) and mowers as if they represent some technological breakthrough like wrinkle cream or Botox. Did you know that a "widger" is essential? It costs £8.50 and is a "cross between a dibber and a hand trowel" used to lever plants from pots. Luckily I already have ten widgers - they are called fingers. Or there's the Sneeboer trowel and fork, costing an astonishing £55, which comes with something called a "weed gouger". At these prices you might as well spend the morning in church singing a few hymns. You'll spare your wallet, and won't feel so stupid.