Halloween

The annual pumpkin carving design falls to OH, who carves a genuinely freaky pumpkin which sits outside our front door with a tealight between its fleshy teeth and attracts Halloweeners. OH has mobilised Boris the Plastic Skull and dug him into a box full of sweets and clementines. OH loves Halloween duties. I'm less keen. Coming from the Continent, with its quaint traditions of Saint Martin lantern processions, bonfires and going from door to door singing songs, I am always a little put out by this, at its core, blunt and bullying approach to Halloween. Never mind that the children who participate come with their parents and politely mumble “Trick or Treat, please” and say thankyou as they leave. There's something peculiarly Anglo-Saxon about this arrangement, a bit like the banks actually: gimme stuff, or I'll trash your house. Or is it Victorian? I need food and money, so I'll turn up at your door and guilt-trip you into giving me something for nothing. 

Either approach is profoundly asymmetrical. The Continental approach – not that I'm defending the money-extraction techniques of the Catholic Church here, far from it – puts the roving band of children in a different position: they're neither bullies nor beggars but more like the collective conscience of a community. They are expected to do something to justify the intrusion – there is singing, usually out of tune, and beautiful home-made lanterns, which cheer everyone up, even the lonely, but the songs are all about the legend of Saint Martin, an early Christian bishop who as the legend goes cut his warm cape in half so that a passing beggar could keep warm. Of course, that beggar turned out to be Jesus. 

So Saint Martin is really a reminder of why it is important to look after the homeless and vulnerable during the coming winter. The first foodbank has now opened up in our town and the stories we're hearing from people we come in contact with during our working week are sobering. Times are getting tough.

Personally, I also hope that the presence of Boris the Skull in the sweet box indicates to anyone planning to trick us that we are, after all, completely mad and will chop them up with our new big axe and put them in the freezer.