Golden numbers and all that jazz.

I'm sure somebody once said that anyone who claimed to understand quantum physics almost certainly didn't. Much the same thing, it seem to me, can be said about the date of Easter. I remember sitting through innumerable boring sermons in church as a child, flicking through the Book of Common Prayer and coming across the page which gave the rules for calculating Easter Sunday and trying to make some sense of them. And yet the basic rule is simple enough - Easter Sunday is the first Sunday following the first full moon which occurs on or after March 21st. So what's the problem - well, "full moon" doesn't necessarily mean a visual full moon - it's a theoretical full moon worked out according to some esoteric timetable, which may or may not coincide with reality. So like I say, if you think you understand it, you probably don't. Suffice to say that Easter Sunday can fall on any date between March 22nd and April 25th - so this year it's almost as early as it can be.