It is a reasonable bet that a fair proportion of readers don’t want to think about Brexit at all right now. It would be very understandable if that’s the case. Brexit politics has meant relentlessly hard pounding ever since the new year. Now there’s a brief hiatus. Parliament is in recess and will return straight after Easter. Theresa May has gone off walking in Snowdonia. Everyone needs a breather. Easter is a good time to reflect. Can the rest of us switch off, too?

But the urgency over Brexit has not gone away. Mrs May, we can be sure, is thinking about it as she eats her packed lunch in the Welsh hills. The rest of us must do our equivalent. Brexit certainly won’t disappear by pulling up the Easter duvet over our heads and ignoring it. These days matter. They should not be frittered away just because we’re all tired.

Probably the most significant signs of activity are the ongoing talks between Conservative ministers and their Labour shadows. These are now taking place in specialist groups. The objective is to find Brexit deals that might command a parliamentary majority without wrecking the two parties. A cloud of apparently good intentions hangs over this process. Everyone makes positive noises. Mrs May’s de facto deputy, David Lidington, said on Sunday that they had “a fair bit in common” over customs objectives. Labour sources say similar things.

This is all very well as far as it goes. But it doesn’t go far. The two parties may be tribal enemies, and their activists and voters have very different views of Britain’s place in Europe. But the fact that the parties also have views in common about Brexit is not a surprise. It is, in fact, the reason why they are talking. This effort has been going on for nearly two weeks. Both sides want to be seen to be trying hard. Neither wants to be the wrecker. But the real question is whether they can turn these talks into a deal that they are prepared to defend. Pretty soon they are going to have to put up or shut up.

These talks are about a soft Brexit alternative to Mrs May’s hard Brexit red lines. Soft Brexit is officially Labour policy. It has long been supported by pragmatic Tories, too. Ministers have now begun to explore it because there is a majority against no deal and Mrs May’s deal. But there are three major problems: the colonisation of the Tory party by no-deal fanaticism; Labour’s grassroots rejection of any Brexit at all; and the reality that a soft Brexit risks being a halfway house that will please no one, settle nothing and leave Britain with the worst, not the best, of both worlds.

It is possible that the talks could produce a consensus on much of the content of a soft Brexit. But how many MPs would then vote for it – let alone stand up for it? Between a third and a half of Tory MPs, at a minimum, will not do so. A similar proportion of Labour MPs will not do so either – not without a second referendum anyway. That second referendum is now the key question facing these talks. It would be the same in any wider deliberative process.

One of the dangers of the EU decision to give Britain six months to sort itself out is that six months is long enough to dilute the sense of immediate crisis but perhaps not long enough to sort out what the country really wants. Having tested their decision-making processes almost to destruction in the past three months, MPs may be tempted to disengage for a while. But there are only five weeks before Britain has to decide whether to cross the Rubicon and hold European elections. By that time, the parties must agree or disagree on a way forward, including on the second referendum question. This is no time to let up.