Some Sights on Fright Night

Halloween is just around the corner and I can’t wait. It's one of my favourite days in the year and I love how everyone in the city young and old embraces it.

The 31^st of October was always a big occasion in our house and since we were no age our costumes have looked the part. My earliest recollection is my brother and I being Oliver Twist and his wee sister with soot covered faces and ragged clothes.

This supporting actress role did not go down well with the three year old me so the following year I was a vision in a rainbow of colours, dressed up as one of those Caribbean women with grass skirt and plastic fruit piled high on my head. Which, incidentally, my younger brother might have tried to eat because I might have told him it was real.

One year the parents decided that my two brothers and I (the young ‘in hadn’t appeared yet) would all dress up as the same thing. We agreed and giggled excitedly in the back of the car on the way home from school thinking about what theme the 'rents had come up with.

Superheroes we concluded. I was surely going to be ‘Shera Princess of Power’ while my brothers were definitely going to be either ‘The Turtles’ or ‘Batman and Robin’.  We were in fact two priests and a nun!

As it was my first communion year I was very holy and took to my role as ‘Sister Anna Marie’ with gusto.  I donned my rosary beads and spent the entire night with my hands joined looking pius while trick or treating and blessing mammy’s for the bountiful rice crispy buns and monkey nuts that they packed into our pumpkin shaped baskets.

Our house was not alone in going all out for Halloween, all my friends were the same, and everybody’s costumes were always home made and brilliant. Someone was a ‘Ghostbuster’ with their dad's overalls and half a vacuum cleaner inside a school bag.

Two kids I know were dressed up as ‘Sam and Ella, two bad eggs’. There were pirates with tinfoil and cardboard swords, skeletons made out of a black jumper and some masking tape and Greek god costumes from a spare sheet pilfered from the hot press.

Now it’s become a multi million pound industry with more and more costumes shops popping up every year. The costumes are expensive but fantastic and everyone young and old takes part.

But the best costumes have to be men dressed up as women. I’m not talking drag queens with impeccable make up and legs to die for. I’m talking your average hairy legged, beer bellied bloke in a miniskirt, halter neck and pink stilettos.

Some may think the essence of Halloween has been lost over the years with it now being a fashion parade rather than a bewitching eve of all souls.

But the sight of of a middle aged man staggering up the road at three in the morning with one shoe, wig back to front and handbag round his neck...now that’s scary!

You've got mail

Online Dating discuss...That was the subject up for debate among a group of my friends recently.
Well, it wasn't  that formal, there was no sign of an audience or David Dimbleby presiding over the proceedings, nevertheless a colourful debate ensued.

Now, having not being a singleton for manys a moon, I couldn't reallly offer much in the way of an opinion although I have to admit that when the subject came up I did the whole 'cough cough lonely weirdos cough cough'. 

However the girl in question who has signed herself up to the most popular site de jour isn't an anorak wearing, bunny boiling loner with an unnecessary collection of porcelain dolls. She is successful, pretty, has all her own teeth and as far as I know has a clean criminal record.
Although, if rumours are true, because of a teenage obssession with Take That she's not allowed within a hundred yards of Gary Barlow, well, having seen how dashing he looks these days I'm sure shes not alone.

So why then you might ponder would she feel the need to sign up to a (snigger) online dating site?
Well she clocks up almost 50 hours a week in work and always has something lined up at the weekend so she literally has no time to meet anyone.
Couple that with the fact that everyone around her is betrothed or wed (I recently watched Jane Eyre and have come over all Charlotte Bronte) and that when she goes to visit her parents her beleaguered mother tells her she has taken to saying novenas in the hope that she will get a grandchild.

So she bit the bullet and found that many online female singletons were in the same boat. Fed up of meeting people in bars and hearing slurred chat up lines 'sheeriously you look, hiccup, like a film shtaar' or meeting someone at the gym 'yeah so I just bench pressed my own body weight, feel my bicep, isn't that amazing' she signed up.

Now she admits that her only experience of this sort of thing is having watched 'You've got mail' nevertheless she (bravely) decided to take the risk of having to date Meg Ryan. As with everything there are minefields and she has come across the odd oddball. There was the guy who posted a profile photo himself...from ten years ago. The bloke who joined the site because he hoped 'all women weren't as evil as his demon ex girlfriend' and the dude who shared a bedroom with 8 lizards and four snakes.

Being the (nosey girls) helpful friends that we all are we convinced her to sign on so we could filter through the profiles and the most shocking aspect of the whole thing was how 'normal' the majority of people were. Granted anybody can come across as normal wihen you only have a stamp sized profile photo and a description in less than 140 characters to go on, but for every person you would cross the street to avoid there were five that seemed your average Joe looking for an average Josephine. She's going on her first 'date' this week. Coffee, during daytime hours, in a busy place, with several exits, just incase it does turn out to be Meg Ryan.

Out of the mouths of babes

Remember school around the corner? It used to be on a Sunday evening before Heartbeat, which incidentally was the programme that signified a bath was imminent and would be swiftly followed by a bout of Monday-itis.

Well, school around the corner involved everybody’s friend Frank ‘the weatherman’ Mitchell having a chat to school children about this and that, while squirming parents held their breath in the audience praying that their precious cherub would not tell the nation the family secrets.

I have several schoolteacher friends and they have at times found themselves in the Frank Mitchell role when a pupil provides too much information. But the funniest has to be some of the answers they and other teachers have come across in exams.

History first and did you know ‘in war time, children in big cities had to be evaporated’ that ‘ancient Egypt was inhabited by mummies who all wrote in hydraulics and crossed the Sarah dessert and that poor Jesus died on Christmas day?

Science now and according to one student H20 is hot water and C02 is cold water, while a magnet is something you find crawling over something that is dead. Apparently before giving a blood transfusion you must check to see if the blood is affirmative or negative.

Did you know that seizure is a roman emperor and a centimetre is an animal with a hundred legs? Terminal illness is when you are sick at the airport and giraffes need long necks because their heads are so far away from their bodies. An adaptation is when you go to live with another family and symmetry is a place where dead people live.

The funny thing about children’s exams answers is that you can see their reason and can trace how their minds have travelled to just short of the correct answer.

What is also funny is spotting plagiarism, where for the most part a story barely makes any sense and then suddenly slap bang in the middle you’ll find the most exquisite prose ‘John wonted to go play sum footbal perchance it happened to be Spring’.

Equally a child can describe something with such aplomb that you would struggle to put it better your self ‘the ballerina lifted her long slender leg, like a dog at a lamp post’.

 And its not just at school that children are free with their information, like the now (in) famous scenario which occurred in my friends house. Every night just as they were about to sit down to dinner the nosey neighbour called round. On one occasion so fed up was he of the nightly intrusion the father of the house exclaimed ‘see if that is that bloody woman again!’ the child answered the door and came back into the kitchen followed by the neighbour and shouted ‘aye you’re right daddy it is that bloody woman!!