Civil Protection Miscellany

  Welcome to my annual rant about Easter.   It took a long time this year but the inevitable happened to me yesterday when somebody asked:   ‘when is Easter this year’, this was followed by the question: ‘is it early or late?   The answer to the latter question is always so unhelpful that I don’t know why it is asked. Look, it is quite simple.   In the western Christian tradition Easter Sunday falls on the Sunday after the paschal full moon, which is the full moon that falls on or after the spring equinox meaning that Easter Sunday can fall between the 22 nd March and the 25 th April in the Gregorian calendar.   Of course this has a knock on and back effect on other festivals such Ash Wednesday and Whitsun.   For years I wondered what happened to the Whitsun half term, but having Easter on castors meant that it sometimes fell at times that were far from convenient for schools and their pupils. Easter has always been problematic.   The curren...

 My most recent blog post for the Crisis Response Journal. This is a subject to which I will return.  It worries me that many organisations believe that debriefing an incident is all that is needed to gain a full understanding of what went well and what didn't.  We have seen at recent public inquiries that organisations are sometimes surprised at the evidence given by their own staff, sometimes years after the event in question. My thanks to CRJ for allowing me to post on this. https://www.crisis-response.com/Publisher/Article.aspx?ID=630966 March 2022