Hallowe'en Bah Humbug, and results of the 9th blog anniversary dishcloth draw!

Where do you stand on Hallowe'en? No really, it is a serious question. Me, I am becoming increasingly Bah Humbug about what I am astonished to learn has become 'our second favourite family celebration behind Christmas'. And that is a headline from The Daily Mail, so it must be true...ahem. I can also feel a creeping Bah Humbugness coming on about Christmas in fact - with its dispiritingly excessive consumerism - so I guess the highly manufactured commercial occasion of Hallowe'en was a natural casualty.

When I was a child growing up in Northern Ireland, Hallowe'en was the only cause for festivities - Guy Fawkes passed us completely by. Instead, we threw ourselves headlong into the serious business of wearing 'false faces' (the Ulsterism for masks), eating toffee apples in the days when we had the teeth to take it, bobbing for apples in the days when we had full neck mobility, and of course lighting fireworks. Though not after about 1968, when letting off fireworks at home was banned due to The Troubles, and it was a case of either attending public displays of pyrotechnics or bust. Additionally, our father had a student who would sometimes act as MC at my Hallowe'en parties, and whose star turn was making a ring move on the end of a string by the power of thought alone. And she had more tricks up her sleeve besides that. Speaking of tricks, we didn't do Trick or Treating in those days, or get dressed up, or decorate the house - there may have been some mimimal interaction with pumpkins, but I don't even remember that.  All the same Hallowe'en still managed to be a relatively big deal in the '60s and '70s - pre- and post-private fireworks.

I guess one of the reasons I went off Hallowe'en is the whole Trick and Treating thing, which came over from the States and which really annoys me, for I hate begging of any description. I don't care for crowd funding for that matter as a way of raising money for anything other than charitable causes, and consider it no more or less than a 21st century euphemism for begging. Then the practice of being mean to people who don't give you the requisite confectionery swag, or who insult you with a bag of carrots, notwithstanding their nutritional value, is anathema to me. Consequently last night I lurked upstairs and did not respond to the serial knocks on my door. I didn't stoop to turning the lights off downstairs, mind, because I simply refuse to be cowed by this tradition to the point of plunging the cat into darkness.

The other reason I went off Hallowe'en is frankly the goriness of people's costumes and make up. I am a squeamish soul and had to avert my eyes many times yesterday while scrolling through the Facebook posts of friends in their full ghoulish regalia. It is not that I can't appreciate the imagination and make up artistry involved, much of it highly elaborate, it is just that I am terrified of the sight of blood. ;) I don't go to Cake Club anymore, and I certainly wouldn't have relished last night's offerings, which included severed finger biscuits. Boy, were they realistic!

Source: Clare Chick

So did I do anything of a Hallowe'enish nature? Well, I did buy a squash for 39p in Aldi, mainly because it was colourful and nicely fills up the fruit bowl in the absence of fruit. I nearly bought a second one to finish the job, but balked at another 39p on an item I would probably not attempt to peel and cook, if indeed you can. For all I know, they may be entirely decorative.

Oh, and I will keep my eyes peeled when I go to the shops next in case they are selling off those little nets of chocolate pumpkin balls and the like. But I shall draw the line at eyeballs or spiders, however deeply discounted.

As for wearing a spooky or witchy Hallowe'en perfume yesterday, not a chance. I am currently trying to use up a few unknown vials which have been lying around for ages, having long since separated themselves from their Les Senteurs card or whatever they may have been attached to in the distant past. So I drained one of those...an oriental of some kind at a guess, but not remotely susceptible to spooking the wearer, I am happy to say.

So there you have it. What a incorrigibly curmudgeonly soul I am in the Hallowe'en department, not entering into the fun at all. I didn't even wear my purple Lipstick Queen Goodbye lipstick that Undina gave me, which might at least have been a small concession to ghostly pallor.

EXCEPT...how much did I enjoy looking at this garden, in a street above my house? What a lot of effort they went to, and what a veritable cornucopia of ghoulish artefacts! The pebbledash pachyderm is particularly unsettling. But seriously, if I was a kid now, I would have loved all that, just as I loved riding the Ghost Train at funfairs. It is perhaps a shame that I have lost my sense of childish wonder somewhere along the way, and become the humbug of today...

And now, on to the dishcloth draw! I excluded the overt DNEMs and put everyone else in. If I misread Lady Jane Grey's wishes a refusal will not offend, and I will do the draw again. As I foretold, the odds were excellent, as only four people were entered, haha.

So, having used the good offices of Random.org I can reveal that the winner of the 9th Blog Anniversary prize draw is:

ANNIE A

Congratulations!

Let me know your address again on flittersniffer at gmail dot com, even though I feel I should have it somewhere already, and I will post your prize off without delay.

The Dutch Go Bonkers!

I am back from Holland (I use the term broadly - The Netherlands always seems a bit of a mouthful to my mind), and am pleased to report that I found Mr Bonkers much improved on my return - particularly on the health front. I should perhaps abandon him more often when he is feeling under the weather, as it may accelerate the recovery process. Though my money's on the curative effects of the two bottles of Ribena he consumed in my absence.

The Californian Road Trip post remains imminent, but meanwhile I feel moved to comment on a couple of Dutch cultural oddities which struck me while I was over there.

Firstly, the Dutch appear to be a nation of pyromaniacs. The setting off of fireworks in Holland is confined to New Year, so this compressed time frame seems to create a tinderbox mentality - or might I mean a hothouse mentality? Either way, to say the Dutch go overboard when it comes to seeing in the New Year with fireworks is putting it mildly: an estimated 65 million euros' worth of the things go up in smoke over the festive period - including several hundred thousands of euros' worth in my friends' street, at a conservative guess - some of them directly over my head. Yes, this is the first time I have ever felt as though I was literally inside a firework display, and I could liken the effect to a cross between the opening credits of Star Trek and 3D TV. And on New Year's Day, there's the inevitable thick carpet of confetti and spent cases to scuffle through - like autumn leaves, but with a telltale note of sulphur.

As one travel site puts it: "(The Dutch) stay at home and celebrate quietly with the family until midnight, then dash out on the streets and indulge in a freestyle orgy of pyrotechnics."

I should also point out that there are two types of firework: the traditional rocket and Roman candle variety, which burst into showers of colourful sparks, and the other kind, so-called "duizend klappers" - which are the mother of all bangers, basically - acoustically akin to heavy artillery, rocket launchers, machine gun fire and the occasional 200 lb car bomb. The loud and startling reports from these incendiary devices reverberated round the neighbourhood from early morning till the small hours. Several of our party remarked that it felt like being in a war zone - images of Flanders Field, Beirut and Baghdad flashed before our eyes as we hunkered down in our friends' living room, reaching for the lids of tins of Quality Street and shortbread by way of improvised body armour. I probably left the country just hours before the shock and awe mutated into full blown Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

And then the second cultural oddity of the weekend was the annual New Year's Dive or "Duik" at Scheveningen, a suburb of The Hague. On New Year's Day, somewhat the worse for wear after the drink, merriment and fire-raising excesses of the night before, around 10,000 Dutch people of all ages - and clad in outfits of varying degrees of scantiness and/or whimsy - rush into the sea on the dot of 12.00pm, briefly get wet and rush out again, before changing en masse (and with barely a shred of inhibition amongst them) in a communal tent erected for this purpose on the sand.

Although I just happened to have bought a swimsuit the day before, I was not so foolhardy as to go in myself, though about half the 15-strong contingent from my friend's village braved the waters, including my fellow countrywoman and owner of Meg, the pipped pageant pooch), though she may have been ever so slightly cheating by wearing a wetsuit... Everybody - "divers" and spectators alike - received a carrier bag from the sausage company sponsoring the event, containing a dayglo orange bobble hat, dayglo orange gloves, a tin of pea soup bearing the legent "dive hero", and a commemorative bookmark/medal, rather optimistically stating that the water was "scrummy", if my rudimentary grasp of Dutch serves me.

And there was one more surprise to come that weekend...In Spakenburg, a sleepy and picturesque fishing port to which we made an excursion on the last day, my friend pointed out a perfumery shop in an alleyway called La Ruelle. The staff were visible inside merchandising the shelves, but the sign on the door clearly stated that the store was "gesloten", so I contented myself with peering through the window.

Imagine my surprise when, nestling amongst the Amouages, Serge Lutenses and Etros - remarkable enough but not completely unprecedented in a small village on the continent - I spied a full shelf of Parfumerie Generales. At 30% off no less! I only know of one retail outlet in the UK for PG (Les Senteurs) and 1-2 at most in Paris. So how come a little shop in Spakenburg in Holland had managed to acquire the line? Does Pierre Guillaume have business connections with Holland? Maybe there is some kind of reciprocal trade agreement in place: perfume for gerookte paling perhaps (smoked eel, a Spakenburg speciality)? Or aged Gouda, cheese graters, Delft tableware, or maybe even the dreaded "duizendklappers"....though for the sake of those poor citizens of Clermont-Ferrand, I do hope not.



And finally, a big thank you is due to our hosts in Hoevelaken for their unstinting hospitality, bottomless wine cellar and banger-free bolthole.


Photos of fireworks from Wikimedia Commons and panoramio.com, photos of New Year's Dive from Wikimedia Commons and Clare Chick, photo of Spakenburg from toeristeninformatie.nl, photo of La Ruelle from the shop's website.