Trick or Treat? Definitely not a treat...

Dear Mum,

With Gaddafi dead and protestors still camped outside St. Paul’s, I feel that I need to voice my own rebellious attitudes.

My unhappy topic is that dreaded time of year. Halloween. I know you feel the same way that I do, Mum.

It’s about as appealing as Sir Brucie on Saturday night primetime – a bit of a nuisance that one could generally do without.

Perhaps if our nation went the whole hog and embraced it as the US does then you and I would feel differently.

But we Brits sit more on the fence. A token carved pumpkin might be positioned on the doorstep and perhaps a witch’s hat is donned when greeting trick or treaters.

This is really where my issue lies.

I was always on trick or treater duty in our house because I was the youngest (though I’m still unsure as to why this fact justifies it being my duty).

This is fundamentally why I dislike Halloween.

I hasten to add that I have no problem with children. It is rather the ideology, the conventions and immorality of the holiday and custom of trick or treating.

For example, a six-year old dressed as a grotesque and unrecognisable monster, with a mask stained with mock blood and a plastic machete in hand, is not what I want to open my front door to.

Equally, I think a witch’s outfit is predictable and dull. Why not be original and dress your child as Ben from Outnumbered this Halloween? I’d find that pretty unnerving. 

I also resent that the vast proportion of trick or treaters seem to be over 15 years of age.

My idea of a pleasant Autumn evening doesn’t involve boosting the sugar levels of a spotty, bearded adolescent dressed as the grim reaper.

More importantly, however, I resent that these are strangers requesting that you place sugary snack in their hands.

I’ll go months without speaking to my neighbours. But 31^st October arrives and the neighbourhood comes knocking at your door.  

And these strangers are judgemental. There is a spectrum of trick or treating snacks, which guarantees a specific reaction depending on the snack’s ranking.

An apple, for example, will gain you an egged house. A KitKat will receive an ‘are you kidding?’ look. A mini mars bar a polite “thank you”. A mini packet of Halloween Haribo will be rewarded with a toothless grin.

Last year, at uni, my housemates and I forgot to buy treats. We fobbed the children off with some cheery bakewell tarts that has passed their sell-by dates before turning off all the lights and pretending we weren’t in.

But even if you pretend to have gone out, you can’t relax on Halloween night. The doorbell is constantly hammered by new trick or treaters and those doubting your absence.

If you do partake in the festivity, the minute you abandon the basket of sweets and lower your bottom to the sofa it is guaranteed the sodding door bell will ring again.

And, damn, you’ve run out of chocolate. The last group were disgusted enough by the Penguins you gave them, what else can you turn to?

Which is where, Mum, you should go down in Halloween history.

Placing a handful of honey roasted nuts, which we ourselves thought tasted somewhat unusual, in individual plastic bags and passing them off as ‘bats’ droppings’ is genius.

That evening, I did rather enjoy greeting the trick or treaters.

Changing my ways

Dear Mum,

Times are hard in the graduate world. I’m a statistic that you will have read in the paper and poor to boot.  

As a result, I cannot spend money unless necessary. Full stop. Lock my credit card away. Don’t let me glimpse a Zara.

I’m trying to come up with new, cheap ways to spend my free time.

So I am reading voraciously, something I wasn’t able to do during my degree. Ironic, as I read English Literature at university.

One of Kate’s friends, who graduated with a degree in English the summer before I started, warned me that I would not be able to read for pleasure for the next three years.

I didn’t believe her and naively packed a box of novels alongside the books listed on my course reading list.

I haven’t touched Margaret Atwood’s ‘The Blind Assassin’ since Fresher’s Week. I will read it soon but, somehow, I cannot bring myself to pick it up. It’s like a time capsule, marked with the point at which I abandoned it for a night out, and I don’t yet feel ready to return to that point in my past.

I have, however, thoroughly enjoyed ‘The Help,’ ‘The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas,’ ‘The Crimson Petal and the White’, ‘One Day’ and other such bestsellers since I modelled my mortar board.  

As much as I love to read, however, I want to be seeing some human life and so, this weekend, I ventured to Tate Britain.

We’re very lucky to have numerous free galleries and museums.

But it is equally quite right that they are free. Art is meant to be looked at. Unlike a book, a painting or sculpture doesn’t require a length of time to be invested, nor the same form of concentration, nor any level of literacy.

But, still, I felt a real sense of self-satisfaction that I was able to admire such fabulous artworks, by Burne-Jones, Turner and Van Dyke, for no cost.

I was, however, somewhat deterred by some of the modern art. Perhaps I am narrow-minded and a stuffy traditionalist, but a few tea trays on wheels arranged on the floor is not what I call art.

It’s what I’d call a health and safety issue. The proof being that a guard grabbed my arm to prevent me from tripping over one of these trays as I distractedly gawped in horror at some debauched photography.

I like my art in painting form, where things are recognisable, in colour and, basically, pretty.

This, when I thought about it, as I returned to a Rossetti painting, is a little unfair on modern art.

I was required to study a wide variety of novels in my degree, including modern texts that denied the traditionalism of Dickens. I did not gel with all of these novels but I did always accept them for what they were; literature, in all its varied glory. Similarly, visual art is just as diverse.

Confused, shattered, pensive, I went for a coffee and big cake to mull over these internal thoughts. I should say I bought a coffee and big cake.

Oops, I did it again...

Handling my irritation

Dear Mum,

On several occasions of late, when making an online purchase, I have come across this novel idea of a ‘handling fee.’  

Yesterday, for example, it was Pippa’s 22^nd birthday and so I ordered some flowers to be sent to her university digs.

(I think, in actual fact, it was Lucinda, my middle-class alter-ego, who chose this as a gift. It does seem peculiar to send flowers to a home in which its residents are barely looking after themselves, with the quantities of alcohol they consume and lack of sleep they get, let alone the capability to look after another living thing. Sadly, the plant that you nurtured the summer before I started university perished at the close of my Fresher’s Week as I instead pursued my new-found independence. I fear Pippa’s lilies might meet a similar fate. But I digress...).

I selected the bouquet, wrote the accompanying message and entered the delivery details.

Upon selecting my credit card brand I was confused by the £1 “handling fee.”

This could not have been correct; the card was in my hand, after all. Surely they had made a mistake?

Yet the order could not be completed without paying this handling fee. What, precisely, did the people receiving my order have to handle?

After all, it was me alone who turned on my computer, typed in the website’s URL and chose which product I wanted to buy with my credit card. How were the credit card company involved in either the decision making or physical process?

‘Handling fee’ simply does not make sense. I would prefer such a charge to instead be named the “any excuse to get more money out of you fee” or the “you’re a chump charge”.

And while I’m on the topic of commercial lingo I’d like to point out that it is not necessary for breakfast cereal brands to include the phrase “serving suggestion” on the face of their packaging, next to the image of a bowl of their product.

After decades of stabbing at a bag of breakfast cereal with a fork, society has finally grasped an easier and less frustrating way for cereal to be enjoyed. An image of the preferred bowl and milk carton is adequate, but please ditch the patronising ‘suggestion.’

As for a certain pizza delivery company, they need to rethink the wording of the voucher card they post through my door every other day. By all means, “Save up to £250” is just fine, but the subsequent “depending on usage” is an excessive use of language that states the bleeding obvious.

If only this candour would instead be adopted by those insisting upon a handling fee...

Take a chance on me

Dear Mum,

I went to the doctor’s earlier this week. You’re not to worry, Mum. I only went for a check-up. There really is no need to ring me when you’ve read this and insist I describe my current state of health.

A doctor’s waiting room is an excellent advert for keeping in good health because it is a pretty miserable place to hang out in.  Not only do you hear and see some unpleasant corporeal goings-on but everyone looks and clearly feels distinctly awkward.

I was relieved when the overhead tannoy called my name and told me which room to go to.

There I was, a 5”2” graduate opening the door to a boy roughly three inches taller than me, looking at me through his wire-rimmed glasses and grinning proudly to display train tracks darting across his pearly whites.

This was my doctor. My doctor, Mum. 

I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had told me he had been the Milky Bar kid a few years ago.

After the initial shock, and quick mental equations to cross-reference his face with my primary school peers, I sat down for my check-up.

He may have been fresh faced and only recently qualified but he confidently cut straight to the chase by asking me about the routine of my female constitution, as he would ask which of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles my favourite was.

I managed to change the subject while he took my blood pressure and engineered a conversation about uni.

He was, quite simply, charming. He was young but not as young as he looked (train tracks will have that effect on a person) and, as the check-up progressed, I felt more at ease in his company.

I must admit, on leaving, I was slightly ashamed of myself. Just because he didn’t have a beard or a wedding ring didn’t meant that he wasn’t capable as a doctor.

I wondered whether employers would share a similar attitude when I step into an interview room. Would they simply see a petite young woman, who looks younger than she is, and doubt her business acumen?

In last week’s blog I commented that I resent being treated as a weakling because of my sex. I do recognise the fact that I am small and slight means that, perhaps, I am not an ideal candidate for a career as a bodybuilder.

The point that I’ve generally tried to drive home is that I think people, and particularly those older generations, should give more credit where it’s due to those of my sex and my age group.

I’m not saying I’m perfect or that the sections of society I represent are. I simply think we need to be given the opportunity to prove ourselves, just like my doctor.

But next week, Mum, I promise to blog about something a little less socially charged.

Independent Women

Dear Mum,

Chivalry is dead. And good riddance to it.

I realise that, perhaps, I wouldn’t be complaining if all men stood aside to let me first board the tube of a morning, or if waiters called me “my lady” as opposed to “ma’am” (which has occurred a few too many times of late).

But I like the female/male dynamic offered by the society I exist in. I like the fact that I can tell male colleagues that I dislike the tone of voice that they just spoke to me with and I can knee them in the doogles if they make presumptive correlations between by mood and that time of the month.

Kate and I get this female independence from you. Not the kneeing in the doogles bit. I mean the giving the verbal middle finger bit. We definitely inherited your girl power attitude.

This isn’t to say that I’m burning my bra. I simply resent being patronised and defined by my sex. Basically, the behaviour displayed by male characters toward female characters in ‘Mad Men.’

Like I said, I’m not complaining – chivalry in all its sexist glory is defunct...

Most of the time...

But every now and then these patriarchal attitudes manage to deviously sneak their way into male and even female attitudes.

For example, any time you, Kate or I lift Grandma’s packed suitcase when she comes to stay. She always shrieks, “Do be careful! I don’t want you doing yourself a mischief.”

Never mind that she herself, a frail 80 year old woman, got it this far.

I don’t find it offensive, I find it condescending. I’m an adult, and a healthy one at that, who is well practiced in moving suitcases and boxes between home and university.

Believe it or not I can lift a finger to help outside of the kitchen.

And so what if I burp? It’s only natural and no-one remarks “how ungentlemanly” if a guy does it. In fact, guys clap one another on the back in congratulation for their oral digestive emissions.

A society that denies my right to help someone lift objects because of my sex? A society without the freedom to declare my female thoughts and opinions, say, in a public diary or blog?

I’d rather open doors for myself thanks.