Baking Hot-Cross Buns for the Queen of Heaven

I know it's wrong, but I do have an abiding interest in church websites that seem kind of out-there.

And at this time of year, as we wait on the edge of an abyss of a whole raft of misinformed articles telling us that Easter is based on a pagan festival, I remembered this little gem.

The proposition, bizarre as it may sound, is that the ancient Angles and Saxons - a Teutonic race - worshipped a goddess which they picked up from the Semitic goddess Astarte/Asherah. This theory is based on a whole series of linguistic jumps, on the one, passing, possibly wrong, reference to a goddess called Eostre, by the Venerable Bede.

So, by a series of gibberish, we proceed to the inescapable logic which surely we knew all along - that Hot-Cross Buns are the modern-day descendants of the cakes baked for the Queen of Heaven.

I don't know who are or were worse, the people that made up these improbable connections in the first place, or the people that propagate them in order to pursue their own, rather weird agendas.

On Good Friday we'll eat Hot Cross Buns here in Husborne Crawley. But then we've been eating them since January. The supermarkets have been running "specials". It's not the Queen of Heaven who's doing well out of this. I reckon it's more likely Tesco.