All Hallows Eve

Hallowe’en tomorrow, and it’s looking set to be an appropriately cold and frosty night. Nonetheless, the little darlings will doubtless be out and about, done up as witches and wizards, ghosts and goblins, vampires and vegetables (I’m guessing pumpkins count as a vegetable … anything to keep the alliteration going). Kids ringing doorbells, singing out “Trick or treat”, racing happily off with handfuls of sweets and chocolate …

Well, maybe in other neighbourhoods. Round here it’ll be a gang of hoodies wanting money. So the gate will be chained, noises outside ignored, the lights dimmed and we’ll settle down to our own Hallowe’en celebrations:

There will be alcohol (red wine, natch, served in the wineglasses decorated with pewter representations of the grim reaper … a present a few years ago from my aunt*).

There will be nibbles.

There will be a DVD triple-bill. A cheapie plastic witches cauldron has been acquired (along with some glow-in-the-dark plastic bats and an illuminated plastic pumpkin) into which we have placed folded-up squares of paper bearing the titles of all the films in our collection apposite to the occasion. Including spoofy stuff like ‘Slither’ and ‘Eight Legged Freaks’, and is-it-or-isn’t-it hybrids like ‘From Dusk Till Dawn’: is it a crime caper? is it a vampire flick? is it spoof? (answer: who cares, it’s got George Clooney, Harvey Keitel and Salma Hayek doing a snake dance in string bikini …).

Three titles will be drawn at random and watched back-to-back. I’ll be logging on just before midnight with a witches’ brew of a posting.



*You can’t get further from the twin-set and weak-cups-of-tea cliché of a maiden aunt than my Auntie Carole: her taste in films is even more esoteric than mine, she loves horror novels, and thinks Ozzy Osbourne is cool.