Fancy

 

Hello everyone. I hope you are well. I am not well. I have, as usual, suffered an over the top reaction to my COVID booster and have spent 3 days wandering about the house complaining about how ill I feel etc.  I had more or less decided that my reactions from the last three injections were entirely psychosomatic and this time I just needed to pull myself together. After all, lots of people just have a sore arm and nothing else. Obviously, my degree of power over my mind is pretty pathetic because I have felt like death warmed up for three days because it triggered a migraine as well. Pah!

Anyway, here we are. I was listening to the radio this morning and they were interviewing a lady in the Northeast of England who runs a place where people can hire Halloween costumes and when the time comes, Christmas jumpers for their children at whatever they feel that they can pay. She has a huge collection that she adds to whenever she can so that children don't have to miss out because their parents can't afford to buy anything during these awful times.  She seems a lovely person and it's a very thoughtful thing to do but I can't help thinking what a completely artificial crisis it is. We have created this nonsense by the way we have taken Halloween on board like it is a flippin' religion or something. If you are very young or American, and therefore wedded to the idea of Halloween as a nationwide sort of compulsory madness, it may surprise you to know that it didn't used to be that big a deal over here. We used to wait a week and celebrate torturing people to within an inch of their lives and then burning effigies of them. We called it Guy Fawkes night. It was very jolly and full of sticky cake and your mum shouting "Don't go back to it!" when your Catherine Wheel fell off the garden fence. 

If we dressed up for Halloween at all, it was very low-key. Usually a sheet with eye holes or a witch's hat that you made in school. It would be considered very bad form to go out in anything genuinely scary like a Scream mask or your six-year-old re-creating a scene from the Exorcist which I believe is par for the course now. I was never allowed to wear the witch's hat when I was little because, you know, Christianity and my dad used to refer to the whole evening as "legalised begging". This probably contributed to my general aversion to fancy dress - see the photo above of a bank "do". I think it must have been some kind of publicity thing but, as you can see from the bottom left, I am resisting the whole idea manfully. Tinsel on my head - best I can give you I'm afraid. By the way, if you are impressed by the costume of the bloke dressed as a Group4 guard, it's very good because he IS a Group4 guard.

I'm not a completely miserable crow by the way - not quite. Here's another photo of me and my friend Chris on a bank fundraising do.

I'm not sure what exactly Chris is doing - drink may have been taken. I, as you can easily see, have come as a very glamorous gipsy. The blouse and skirt are my own, the headscarf borrowed from my mum and the tambourine had been "donated" by a nice lady from the Salvation Army - initially for me to play in the church youth group but I'm sure she would have been fine with it - good cause and all that. I think you will certainly agree that I am giving out some very strong Ava Gardner Barefoot Contessa energy here.

Somehow, we have allowed ourselves to be dragged into someone else's agenda where all this daftness has to make money for someone  - so it has to be out of a packet and competitive. And does it really matter? Well, I suppose it does. I think it takes a good amount of sass to not be bothered that your kid is in a bit of rubbish you have thrown together while everyone else is wearing pre-bought full suits that they are using to put together a tableau from "Orphan - First Kill". 

This isn't anything new... Look at Matthew...

All this time and money wasted on fashion—do you think it makes that much difference? Instead of looking at the fashions, walk out into the fields and look at the wildflowers. They never primp or shop, but have you ever seen colour and design quite like it? The ten best-dressed men and women in the country look shabby alongside them.

And you know, looking at these photos, I was struck by one thing. I looked ok really. My memories of those times are not good. I thought I was a plain Jane, a bit clumsy but, in fact, I looked fine really - even in a Dorothy Perkins blue and white blouse. We all looked fine - we generally look fine and also it's not that important - it's not the big deal that we think it is. It's not easy to walk the line between seeing the nonsense for what it is and not being the most miserable person on earth. But it doesn't matter - it really doesn't. Our job is to treat it like that and not think that it is a thing that should add extra, unwanted pressure to families that are already making tough choices around actual food and heat. Leave it - it's not worth it.