Allhallowtidings!

Look into my eye... Can you see me?

It would be pretty much impossible to ignore the fact that yesterday was Hallowe'en. You can hide in the kitchen with all the lights off, but out there on the street godless young fools are flirting with powerful forces they wot not of, in pursuit of ... well, cheap sweets, mainly. What a price to set on your immortal soul! As I have complained before, this orange, sugar-tacky American import has now largely supplanted our thoroughly wholesome native celebration of certain 17th-century, anti-Catholic, pro-royalist hangings, drawings, and quarterings, as well as an unspecific, but all-encompassing joy in public burnings at the stake in days gone by. Ah, the world we have lost!

The confluence of Hallowe'en and the school half-term holiday is a commercial opportunity not to be missed, and even a respectable institution like Bristol's City Museum & Art Gallery can feel the urge to cash in celebrate. It is probably not entirely coincidental, then, that they currently have an exhibition running, called Do You Believe In Magic?. They've dug deep into their collection of amulets, charms, and assorted magical paraphernalia from around the world – and I truly love such stuff – but they have fallen headlong into the dark pit the wise call over-interpretation. I'd so much rather ponder some well-lit, well-labelled cabinets of curiosities, than have my mind made up for me by some half-informed curator about what it is I'm looking at, and what connects this with that. Not that I could really see what I was looking at terribly well, in the "atmospheric" dark chambers of an exhibition rather too reminiscent of an aquarium. But then, it's not aimed at me, is it?

No, look into MY eye... I can see you!

Most people these days think of Hallowe'en as a one-night-only license to dress up and/or score sweets off their more gullible neighbours. We're not completely against this sugar-led corruption of our youth, much as we'd rather they were collecting firewood to burn the Pope in effigy in a few days' time. I have already mentioned our household's venerable Skanky Sweets Bucket, annually-resurrected, which is full of alarmingly out-of-date, but durable items like Haribos and jelly babies (but which, I have to admit, are starting to look a bit too zombified to avoid potential future legal action). However, Hallowe'en (or All Hallows' Eve) is actually just the first of a three-day binge of Christian observances known, in British tradition, as Allhallowtide.

So we know all about Day One, or at least we think we do, which is, to the contemporary mind, much the same thing. But Day Two, November 1st, is All Saints' Day (no, idiot, not them), on which occasion we, which is to say "they", honour all the saints and martyrs, known and unknown. I like the idea of the unknown saints, the ones who just got on with being saintly, and didn't go on about it all that much. If you're going to have saints, those are probably the best sort to have. Then comes Day Three, All Souls' Day, on which the faithful dead are honoured, especially friends and family. In Mexico November 2nd is, of course, a Big Thing: El Día de Muertos. But it seems that in many other Catholic countries the two latter days tend to get rolled into one big November 1st "let's all remember the dead" holiday, something that is quite therapeutic, I imagine, but with which we've completely lost touch in the chilly Protestant north. I don't suppose many young Hallowe'en celebrants give much thought to dear old granny, the day after they've pestered the neighbours and begun the ruin of their teeth. Besides, in the past we were all too busy in early November gathering combustibles into a tottering anti-Papist heap.

I'm not sure if or when the unfaithful, pagan, agnostic, atheistic, or even the grateful dead get honoured, but there must be an awful lot more of them out there by now, wherever they are. Maybe a democratic movement of the dead will eventually emerge, and get this diary-issue sorted out? They've got all the time in the world, after all, even if we haven't. Not yet, anyway. But I will certainly be setting aside a few moments this evening to remember some of my dear, departed elective family: happy heathens, all of them, to the very end. So I propose the traditional toast: To absent friends!

Ah, make we the most of what we may yet spend,
Before we too into the Dust descend;
Dust into Dust, and under Dust, to lie,
Sans Wine, sans Song, sans Singer, and – sans End!
FitzGerald version of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, Quatrain 23

 Hey, you! Yes, you!

Look into my eyes! What do you see?