The Greek Orthodox Church celebrate their Easter a week after the rest of us Roman Catholic types. They call it Pascha and see it as the most important holiday of the year – more important even than Christmas. Herself is as Greek as they come, so last Saturday night, she took us to St. Sophia’s Cathedral in Bayswater, West London, for the Resurrection Mass.

Setting out late, we arrived to find the chapel filled out the door, across the grounds and down the street. It looked like half the Greeks in London had turned up and she says it’s the same back home; if you don’t go early then you won’t get in. The evening was warm and we’ve never minded standing so we found ourselves a plot amongst the gathering and settled. The church had rigged up a sound system on the street for us, but I don’t speak a word of the language so I just nod when I’m told and try not to draw attention to myself. She tells me that they have a torch in the cathedral brought specially from the holy land and that it’s all part of their tradition. They bring it into the country on a special flight, says she, and the flame never goes out. I’m not too sure if I believe her, but I didn’t have any of the appropriate facts in my possession at that time and anything I have found since has shown her to be right.

Coming up to midnight, she reaches into her bag and pulls out a pair of candles and a couple of boiled eggs, their brittle shells painted blood-red in watercolour. She hands me one of each, keeping hold of a set for herself, and says that we need to wait for the right moment. I have no notion as to what’s happening, but soon enough the priest says the magic word over the speaker and everybody gets to shaking hands and kissing one another on the cheeks. Then he lights a candle on the holy torch and shares the flame amongst the congregation to multiply throughout the crowd outside. Whether you go in for religion or not, it’s a beautiful sight as the discrete light spreads through this midnight assembly of hushed celebration.

Christ is risen, she says and we light our candles and kiss. She tells me to hold out my egg upright and then smacks it with the top of her own. The brittle shell top of my egg is pulverised. We flip them and I do the same to hers. My egg cracks again. She wins. We kiss again. They call it Tsougrisma, which means to hit with each other and they use the term to describe a falling out between two lovers. According to custom, if you lose then you have to eat your cracked egg. I know that her parents mailed those things to her over two months ago, it’s going nowhere near my mouth – prolapsus is no way to end a weekend.

On the walk to the train, I put my arm around her and laugh that with the world banks looking to get their loan settled, the Greeks would be wise to keep ahold of those candles. They could be using them to light their homes soon enough. She says this isn’t the occasion for that kind of talk. She’s right. She’s almost always definitely right.