There is a lot to be said for loosening the stays at Easter and for retailers to open their doors.

A couple of days ago there was one of the year’s more tedious days. It was Easter Sunday and apparently around 13% of the UK’s population headed for the chapel/pulpit/nave to mark the occasion. Which means that 87% did not.

In the normal run of things this would mean that the shops would do a roaring trade as we headed off to Ikea to stave off the boredom, snaffle a few meatballs and perhaps get some of that DIY furniture that graces the rooms of almost all.

Yet the overwhelming majority were closed and a quiet stroll along the main drag in Aberystwyth revealed the relatively disappointing fact, at least if you’re a retailer, that there were droves of people staring through the store windows and wondering what to do next.

At this point, if you were the head of a retail organisation, you might be inclined to consider opening on Easter Sunday. This may not be popular with the Christian minority, but on a day when the wind was whipping in from Yakutsk (eastern Siberia and the earth’s cold pole) and the wind chill was such that it felt as if you really were in permafrost land, what else was to be done.

All of which is a cold-winded way of saying that perhaps Easter Sunday, as the last bastion of mass retail closing, should perhaps loosen the clerical gaiters and welcome shoppers. In truth the day passed in Aberystwyth as it probably did in masses of other places. Those who couldn’t shop headed off to the pub, the one that was open, or stayed indoors and cooked up a substantial Easter dinner.

Now imagine if things were a little different. You wake up on Easter day, eat a few chocolate eggs and then head off to the shops for a little retail therapy, followed by a decent lunch in a nearby hostelry. Nobody got hurt, nobody died (well, He did, but there again, this is the day when He’s on the up and up) and most had a good time.

It’s a modest proposal and would make an awful lot of people considerably happier and might go some way towards negating that stir-crazy feeling that tends to manifest itself when families are cooped up together for more than a day or two.

Easter should be one of those days that means different things to different people and retailing should form part of its ambit. Ave Maria, gee it’s good to see ya (with apologies to Tom Lehrer).