Picture caption: This stuff about dressing up at Halloween? It's for the kids, isn't it?

DocOfLove's recent blog entry got me thinking about Halloween, and just how much it has changed over the past dozen years or so (in the UK, at least). When I was a kid, my parents used to say, "it's Halloween tonight," make a silly ghost noise, and that was about all the notice anyone took. Then, a Charlie Brown cartoon was aired showing Charlie and the gang dressing up in diabolic costumes, and knocking on all the neighbourhood doors asking for sweets (actually, they asked for 'candy', but let's not split linguistic hairs). For the next, I don't know, dozen or so years, we were aware of what Trick or Treat meant, but it never happened here.

I suppose it was about 15 years ago that the first knock on the OfClayton front door was answered to a street urchin dressed in what could imaginatively be described as a Halloween costume, demanding appeasement with menaces . . . and then it all went mad. Huge gangs of kids would roam the area with sacks, ready to egg the unwary householder who dared to question the 'tradition', or offer nothing more substantial than a Nuttal's Mintoe. There were even organised gangs who would fill a transit van full of teenagers with cheap masks, and drop them off at the end of a street, so they could go from door to door demanding cash. Now, I'm not saying these operations were run by gypsies . . . . but they were!

Moving forward in time a very few years, and the party industry caught on. People love an excuse for fancy dress and partying, and if this was the alternative to staying in and not knowing how to react when a small vampire or zombie knocks at your door for the nth time, then you can see why people lapped it up. And if someone, somewhere is making a few extra quid selling costumes, you can bet your last mintoe that the supermarkets will want to put a stop to that by mass-marketing and undercutting any entrepreneurial little-guy right out of the ball park.

And once the Supermarkets want you to buy something, it's as good as law that you do it. And so, once 'back to school' is safely out of the way, the supermarket shelves turn orange (who decided orange was the colour of Halloween?) with chocolate shaped like pumpkins and witches hats, for the next six weeks.

Then comes the yet-to-be-fully-commercialised-but-you-can-bet-the-supermarkets-are-having-meetings-about-it Bonfire Night. Bonfire Night used to be the 5th November. As a kid, we used to trudge along to the local 'organised display', which consisted of a fire in the corner of a farmer's field, a few fireworks, mostly ground based, a jacket potato, a piece of parkin, and a big 'ooooo', when the final crescendo (a single rocket) was fired. This took place on the evening of the 5th of November, whatever the day of the week, and whatever the weather. Now, you'll find people burning Catholic effigies during not only the week of the 5th November, but also the Friday and Saturday nights of the weekends at either side.

Do I sound like I don't like this state of affairs? Let me tell you that I do like it. Let me explain why. For the last half century or so, Christmas has been creeping insidiously further and further upwards through the calendar like rising damp. Like a weed, little tentacles of Christmas have been worming their way through December, and November, and were encroaching their way into October in the form of Christmas stuff appearing in shops here and there, a day or so earlier than the previous year. Then the next year, a few more shops surrender to the scarlet tendrils, in order to stay competitive. I remember my Dad saying one year, "Christmas cards! It's not even bloody December yet." But then, the polytheists came to the rescue. A sort of pagan barrier was erected at the bottom of October against which the inching Yuletide incursion could only struggle in vain, buoyed up as it was by the anti-Catholic Bonfire Night. The supermarkets only have room on their shelves for one or the other, and remember, they dictate your life for you, whether or not you naively believe the contrary.

So, the Monotheist Christmas Holiday is locked in mortal combat with the Polytheist Halloween. Who will win? Tesco, that�s who.

�Eyup mi duck

As a header for this section of my blog, I�ve used a traditional greeting most often used in Nottinghamshire, and sometimes south Yorkshire. To explain. �Eyup is used more widely in the north of England as �Hello�. �Mi� is �my�, and �duck� is a term of endearment used towards children and ladies by men, towards children and men by ladies, and less so towards adults of the same sex.

Education out of the way. Here�s why: There�s been another first at OfClayton Towers. Tom and Barbara who�s small-holding backs on to the east range at OfClayton Towers, keep (along with many other edible animals), some ducks. When the ducklings first arrived, in conversation with Tom & Barbara it emerged that neither Mrs ofClayton, nor myself, had ever eaten a duck egg. �Righto,� said Tom, �you can have the first ones . . . though they take a while before they start laying.�

I have blogged in the past about Tom & Barbara�s neighbour The-Man-Who-Lives-At-The-End-Of-My-Garden (now, sadly, deceased), and about his encyclopaedic knowledge of country ways. His wise counsel concerning whether or not a duck is ready to lay, goes as follows: �If you can only get one finger up it, it isn�t ready to lay. If you can get two fingers up it, it is ready to lay.� Sage words, I�m sure you�ll agree. So, when one of the ducks was tested and found ready to lay, it heralded quite some excitement. Sure enough, yesterday morning, for the first time ever, I had a duck egg with toasted soldiers for my breakfast. I�m easily pleased.