Monday 27th October, 2003 – Halloween Craziness *exclamation mark*exclamation mark*

Guildford High Street is a confused and a confusing place at the moment. Its bad enough trying to negotiate a safe path through the town centre during the rest of the year, especially at the weekend – what with the ranks of smiley-faced charity collectors / muggers, Borough Council-sanctioned, middle-class-friendly ‘performance artistes’, and the piles of sullen, massive-jean-wearing teenagers reclining on deckchairs, holding large signs saying ‘Bargain Carpet Warehouse Only 50 Yards Away!’ and ‘Eat Until Your Colon Explodes at the Juboraj Indian Buffet, 12:00 – 14:00 Weekdays’.

But the coming of the Christmas season makes weekend shopping even more of a harrowing ordeal than usual. Plus, with Halloween falling this Friday, there is a bitter struggle for window space going on in our shops, with large, life-sized, neon skellingtons jostling for position with, waxy-cheeked Santa Clauses.

The battle is fairly evenly tied in most shops, but Halloween is the hands-down winner in the local sexy lingerie / Anne Summers-style shop. There are a number of ‘sexy’ Halloween costumes in the window, including sexy witch, sexy devil, and sexy cat. What is it about Halloween that gets people so damned sexy? While I’ve never taken it hugely seriously either way, one emotion that has never been aroused in me, by this annual celebration of evil and the undead, is sexiosity. I notice that there are no sexy Frankingstein costumes, with sexy bolts and sexy platform shoes, nor any sexy zombie costumes, with sexy exposed internal organs, and sexy flaps of rotting skin. Why can’t these monsters be sexified, eh? You mad perverts!

Obviously, the whole vampire thing had something of a sexual side to it – porcelain-skinned, heaving-chested beauties succumbing to the advances of a powerful, well-spoken older man. But even then, all the women got out of it was an eternity of undead torment. Not very sexy at all in truth. Indeed, it marks Draclia out as a very inconsiderate lover – once he has got what he wants, he swiftly withdraws and skulks back to his coffin, leaving his partner with infinity to brood on what a selfish prick he is.

But, like Christmas, Halloween is really for the kids. Except at Christmas only parents are physically intimidated and emotionally blackmailed into giving their obnoxious offspring what they want. At Halloween, we are all fair game. All the same, I imagine that Guildford ‘trick or treaters’ will be reasonably well behaved, at least compared to the little shits who used to rampage through my estate when I lived in York. They were horrible, and used to shout abuse at me and my student housemates as we returned home every day. And yet, at Halloween, they had the gall to come knocking on our door asking us to share our precious stash of Haribo Soft-Mix. Not likely. But, they were vicious, bullying little 10 year-olds, and our favoured policy was – rather than confronting them – to turn off all the lights and crouch in the dark until they went away.

Some would say that the best thing would be to give these little arseholes poisoned M & Ms laced with some kind of sterilising agent, so that they can never inflict another generation of the hateful spawn on the planet. Not me though. I wouldn’t say that.