HALLOWEEN

I used to love Halloween. Having been brought up in Hong Kong, we had the US influence a long time ago, so I was “Trick or Treating” years ago. Here in the suburbs, however, it is a different matter. Nobody I know grew up with, so they simply don’t get it. They either go one way or the other – hating it with a vengeance, locking all the doors, turning out the lights and sitting in the dark for 3 hours or loving it far too much, going completely over the top, organising parties and tour groups and costumes and theme food and so on. One friend flew back early from a business meeting just to make sure she was there.

Things have changed since my day – we didn’t have to only knock on a bloody door where there was a lit pumpkin, carved into the shape of Frankenstein’s head and we didn’t have to answer as to whether we had a nut allergy before being given a bloody chocolate. In fact, I recall I was given a box of chocolate liquors once and they didn’t ask me whether I was an alcoholic (luckily).

Otherwise sane grown-ups in our neck of the woods must have spent all day decorating their houses and themselves. Then they spent far too much time opening the door in a creaky, scary way and then one of them actually said to my 7 year old “ooooh look at you, what a chubby little boy…..lots of flesh on you to eat”….not exactly PC.

Anyway, my son looked better than all the skeleton and witch masks. Luckily for him his uncle is a prosthetic artist for one of the hospital programmes on TV – so he came round and did his stuff. He had a slash right the way across his face and down his neck. He had blood everywhere. Very cool. Although perhaps a little too real. He really freaked the little ones out.

According to extremely unreliable sources 120 million pounds is spent on Halloween each year around the world. On that basis, I would like to make a suggestion. Why don’t we, next year all pool the money we spend and send it off to save a large African country? To compensate our spoilt children we could buy them a bag of sweets, force them to eat them all, put up with hyper kids for the evening, clean up the vomit and put them to bed.