Melanie McDonagh

Christ is risen; happy Easter all round. It’s a pleasing festival in all sorts of ways, chief of which is that it’s wildly uncommercial, being the Sunday following the full moon following the spring equinox, if I’ve got that right. So, not a usefully neat date like 25 December, and one that retailers find much more difficult to exploit except as a means of flogging lamb legs (folks – lambs have only four legs, but they also come with shoulders, you know, which are even nicer) and obviously, chocolate eggs… though Eastern Christians do it better, with hand coloured eggs, which they get blessed at church. Anyway, it’s still a Christian festival, so cue for the usual bout of anxiety about the condition of Christianity in England.

Well, Islamists certainly have a useful working knowledge of the Christian calendar -- probably more than most secular Brits -- which accounts for the timing of today’s bloody attacks on Coptic churches in Tanta and Alexandria -- the death toll is 45, and counting. The unfortunate Copts starting their Holy Week services today were intending to commemorate the Passion of Christ, not to join it themselves. As the British Coptic Bishop Angaelos observed, 'As we celebrate Palm Sunday today and Christ’s entry into Jerusalem, we now also mark the entry of those who have passed today into the heavenly Jerusalem.' Well quite so, and the toll in Alexandria might have included the Coptic pope Towadros II, who was at the mass, if the attackers had been even luckier.

Well, Sir Christopher Wren's epitaph got an airing in St Columba’s church in Derry today for the funeral of Martin McGuinness. You remember: 'Si monumentum requiris, circumspice,' the monuments in question being the face of London. Well, Fr Michael Canny, who delivered the homily at McGuinness’s funeral in St Columba’s church, said that if people wanted to see a monument to Mr McGuinness they should look around them. 'There are people in this church today whose presence would have been unthinkable only a generation ago,' he said. 'They have forged working relationships with Martin McGuinness; they have built friendships with him; they have occupied Stormont’s benches alongside him. Some have even sat in government with him.

Roy Hattersley would never have been born had it not been that his mother ran away with the parish priest who instructed her in the Catholic faith before her marriage to a collier — the priest conducted the wedding; a fortnight later they eloped. This deplorable episode had one happy consequence: the birth of Roy, who never knew the reason for his father’s ease with Latin until after he died. So Roy is in a way a small part of his latest book, The Catholics, a history of the church and its people in Britain since the Reformation. He is an atheist but says, ‘Religion in general — belief in the unbelievable — fascinates me.

Happy St Patrick’s Day to the Irish, one and all. There are plenty of Brits who are a bit Irish, and the Irish government tries to include as honorary Irish, or would-be Irish, pretty well everyone else. Obviously, St Patrick himself wasn’t actually Irish, but a Brit, so thank you, Britain, and well done. The position of the Irish in Britain – and indeed the British in Ireland, proportionately as large – is one of those historic ambiguities which doesn’t really fit into any of the contemporary narratives about being in or out of things. Ireland, other than six counties, obviously isn’t part of the UK, but it’s not foreign either.

The notion of artificial life created in a lab – heralded today with the news that scientists at Cambridge have managed to combine two sets of mouse stem cells to start the process of embryo creation is mildly alarming, no? Shades of Aldous Huxley, Brave New World? These aren’t exactly embryos; a scientist friend prefers to call them embryoids, or proto-embryos, a bit like those brain-like organoids that can now be created to mimic the behaviour of actual brains. But it would seem that the Cambridge team may have come close to actual embryo creation; if it had added a third set of stem cells, the yolk, to sustain development, then it’s possible it would have gone on to develop an actual mouse embryo from there.