It is Easter Sunday and I want to hide some eggs. Not for the kids, who are too old for this, but for me, and for the maintenance of a fiction that inside some smelly pre-teens are three five-year-olds, standing on the brink of reason, tethered to their first age of wonder by the discovery of sweets in unexpected places. For as long as there are offspring in this house who will still eat chocolate, I will still hide chocolate eggs.
The truth is, even when they do stir themselves to find the eggs, they don’t even eat them, it is like the coins at the bottom of a Christmas stocking, eggs in bulk are somehow engineered to be hoarded rather than used, a prototype for money.
I am very well aware of the risks of the enterprise, especially in a freakishly well-insulated house, in the unseasonal heat. I once had a boyfriend’s parents to stay for Christmas, because the dad was recovering from an operation on his colon, and I put a mid-sized chocolate Santa on their pillow as a welcome, only they unaccountably didn’t find the Santa, which melted overnight, and they thought … well, it is obvious what they thought.
The house is small and without nooks. There are at least two people in it who won’t let me rootle about in their rooms, unsupervised. There is a dog who is a tenacious finder and who isn’t allowed to eat chocolate. There is a rabbit, who would immediately expire if he ingested silver foil, because rabbits are pathetic. It’s like a Rubik’s Cube: how are you supposed to hide things in these conditions? Where would they never look? “Inside the dishwasher,” said my Mr. “Oh, oh, wait, I’ve never seen any of them use the washing machine. I don’t think they know we have a washing machine. What about the laundry basket? The tumble drier? Behind the deodorant? With the mop? Inside the vacuum cleaner!” “Do you think this hunt is getting a bit passive aggressive?” “No, better, underneath the crap on their own floors. We could hide gold bullion underneath the crap on their own floors.”
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
