Halloween

Now, I like celebrating stuff. I have always been a big fan of Christmas (although when I worked in retail it did all pass by in a blur - and there is nothing as depressing as working on Boxing Day with a roaring hangover) and celebrate my birthday with some sort of night out. Which normally involves drinking stupidly large amounts and generally behaving like a fool. For example, my last birthday ended with me managing to convince a tramp/wino/beggar to give me a cigarette. Which is utterly pointless as I don't smoke - and if I did, I didn't have a lighter. Although it did lead to an interesting moment the next day when I turned to one of my best mates, with only the haziest of recollections of the end of the previous evening, and demanded to know why I had a fag in my pocket.

My point is this - some occasions do warrant celebrating. Halloween isn't one of them.

Let's be honest, it is an also ran event. Just before Bonfire Night and Christmas, and generally celebrating the dark side of life, it is difficult to get too excited about. Thinking about my days in retail, I remember we would have an aisle dedicated to Christmas from September onwards, and as the 25th December neared, Christmas would take over the entire store. As for Halloween, you would be lucky if we bothered with a plinth at the end of one of the aisles. And rather than increasing the profile of Halloween as the 31st October loomed, we would be more concerned about the unsold merchandise. I mean, what the hell do you do with an unsold, cheap, tacky skeleton mask on the 1st November?

But something seems to have happened to this non-event. It seems to have become an opportunity for begging. And not just beggars begging, but everyone. This evening, on my way home from work, I was stopped by grown adults wearing stupid costumes and asked whether they wanted to give me any money. I'm sorry, what? I'm supposed to give you money because you are dressed like a witch who is reduced to shopping in the discount section of Primark? Not a hope. The fact that it is Halloween makes no difference to me whatsoever. You're dressed like a twat. There is no way I am going to encourage you by giving you money.

However it is worse than just stupid behaviour on one night of the year. Two weeks ago I was on Old Street, on my way to meet an old friend (and was, perhaps inevitably, running two hours late and calling my friend frantically so I could get directions) and I was stopped by a group of kids, probably about ten years old, asking me for money for Halloween. Their parents were nowhere to be seen. It is somewhere between insulting and laughable that these pre-teen kids would be allowed out to "trick or treat" for money two weeks prior to Halloween. It is not so much as case of America exporting her trick or treating customs to this country, but rather us taking those traditions and turning them into something comical and terrible at the same time. In the US kids go out looking for sweets on the night of 31st October. In this country, kids go out two weeks before, looking for money. Which is kind of understandable, given on Halloween itself, it is the adults who are out, dressed like failed stage school applicants, looking to scab money from me even though most of them probably earn more than me anyway.

So Halloween has become a night to stay in and not do anything, for fear of being hassled by an army of beggars that seem to come straight from a cheap rip-off of a George A. Romero film. If you want to know how I will be spending Halloween, then it is watching a film in bed, trying to recover from a hacking cough caught from a friend at work.

And which film will I be watching? Why, Halloween, of course...