dimanche 31 octobre 2004

Halloween pooch... Trick or Treat? With Halloween falling on a Sunday this year and France being a very Catholic country I had thought that the local children would have got it all over with yesterday... but no, Saturday evening was merely the prelude. In fact yesterday's callers were more in the style of English "Trick orTreat" practitioners... basically teenagers out on the streets after dark and up to no good. Here, however, I was surprised by their refusal to accept small change in return for not covering your hair and face with spray-cobwebs and / or a blast of the eardrums with an air-horn! And higher value loose change wasn't in demand either... they wanted a piece of fruit or a few bonbons. This reminded me of when a couple of Boy Scouts from Paris tapped on the door and offered me two oranges in exchange for anything I chose to give. After it was explained that this was a sort of game (I think that's how I interpreted the conversation) I reached into my pocket and started counting out a few euro coins so they could buy some chocolate in the local store. It was absolutely the wrong thing to do... they explained that money should never be offered but that I could perhaps give something for them to eat if I wished... so I fetched a tin of beans, some apples, pears and a bottle of pressed juice which pleased them judging by their smiles. Tonight's Halloween scaremongers have already started and are as imaginative in their dressing-up as the millions in North America who enjoy this festival in the right spirit... unlike the few I saw in the UK who seem to think the word Halloween means "Aggravation" with a capital A. Here we've had a succession of witches, wizards and skeletons this afternoon... all looked alive 'though faking dead or close to it, but when I do my staged-but-believable reaction of expressing shock-horror on opening the door all they seem able to utter are muffled giggles instead of bood-curdling shrieks! Ah well, whatever turns them on. One thing they didn't plan too cleverly was wearing three inch false fingernails... when wearing appendages it's darn difficult to grab a handful of assorted sweeties from a tin! One warning I must add... when these 6-year old witches stuff their eager hands into the sweetie tin... watch out when they lower their heads to see what their long fingernails are not grabbing hold of... chances are the tip of a black pointy hat will poke you in the eye! I guess if I'd been using a digicam (yeh, yeh, yeh... I know) I'd have been able to upload some bewitching images onto tonight's blog in a couple of moonlight minutes... as it is, old-stick-in-the-mud Mr Luddite had to develop a film and make a scan from the negative (which was surprisingly easy on my recently acquired CanoScan 9900F) of a shot I took yesterday... but it's a cute pic of a neighbour's pooch who just happened to pop out of a gap in the hedge right next to the Halloween pumpkin. It's no work of art but I hope you like it for it's topicality if nothing else. Have a great night out there... including my daughters and their kids in Denver, Toronto and Vancouver! Wheeeeee... wish I was there with you! 7:01:16 PM    comment []