31-10-16

There was a Spiderman, a Batman, Darth Maul, two or three pirates, a princess, several witches, a Harry Potter, a pretty scary zombie and some pretty cute zombies. There were tiny ones who couldn’t really walk yet and older ones bending down, too young to give up the fun but old enough to be a bit embarrassed because they are wanting to be grown up most of the time unless it’s fun and there’s chocolate and sweets and siblings to look after.

And they all, to a monster, liked our pumpkin. I did too. Suzy did a top job. It looked splendid and scary and had scars and the candle flickered menacingly inside. And they all, to a monster, smiled and said thank you and were excited and playing together. And I heard loads of different accents and thought, well, ya know, monsters don’t really have national boundaries it seems, and witches can play with zombies and the Flash can do a swap with Supergirl - a lollipop for a blag Aldi Milky Way bar – and their folks can watch from the gate and smile.

I brought the pumpkin in at a suitable they’ve-all-gone-home-to-bed style time, and I thought of all the English and Bulgarian and Welsh and Polish and Syrian and Golgafrinchan parents that would be kept awake for hours by sugar-demented kids bouncing off the walls and puking up insane neon colours from the more Halloweeny type soft sweets, and I wondered exactly when it would be that kids like these turned into people who decided that instead of sharing fun and being undead or wielding plastic broomsticks and carving pumpkins, that instead of all this they’d blame each other for all the bad things in the world because they’d been taught to hate instead.