Frightening...

My run tonight was much quicker than of late with a pace of 5'17" over 4.35 km in 23'02". And as I ran around the Bay tonight I saw two kids dressed up as bats for Halloween. They were ringing a doorbell but there was no answer. They looked a little confused, glancing back to the gate where their mum stood in a Puffa style jacket, smoking and talking on her mobile. In a competition for the most frightening, she'd've beaten the kids every time.

We never had halloween when I was a kid. We were too busy; either collecting wood for our bonfire for Guy Fawkes night or trying to set light to other kids' bonfires. Of course, we'd heard of Halloween and knew what it was but we didn't mark it in any way.

It seems that over the last 30 to 40 years it's grown in popularity here; a US import of the 80s along with Dallas and Dynasty. A pagan festival adopted by the early church and preserved in Catholic heartlands, it first took a grip in America when the Irish and Scots émigrés took it over with them in the 19th Century.

It has now become embedded and commercialised (inevitably) here with whole families dressed up in the cheap, supermarket bought costumes of assorted ghouls and witches. Out for a mid afternoon stroll, replete with halloween themed sweets, cakes and biscuits, Mum, Dad and the kids can be seen in MacDonalds or BHS - zombied out with their made up ashen faces, sunken eyes and weeping sores.

At the other end of the spectrum you have the nearest Saturday to Halloween populated by hoards of revellers hell bent on getting rat arsed and dressed up as something but, it often seems, nothing Halloween related. Santas, Elvises, Village People, Smurfs and the odd slutty nurse seem to be the order of the day - although what they've got in common with Halloween, who knows?

My one attempt to celebrate it a couple of years ago (pictured above) was the result of much vodka, lots of eye make-up, a long black fur coat and excruciatingly painful snake-eyed contact lenses.