Swimming Against the Tide

The sky fell this morning. Cats and dogs. Curtain rods. It fell last night too. I will admit to feeling sorry for the young children “trick or treating” for Halloween – not so sorry for the teenagers trying to blag candy based on little or no effort.

I ended up in charge of answering the door as the first wave of children arrived in the early evening. Two of my daughters prepared pumpkins and lit them – apparently the sign to those wandering past that we were “open for business”. We had a *lot* of candy.

My favourite visitor of the evening was a little girl – no taller than your knee – dressed as a witch, and tightly holding her big brother’s hand while her Mum crouched behind her. She stumbled over her words before informing me that she was a witch. Her mum grinned at me with the biggest shrug and the toothiest smile as we said our goodbyes and she wandered off into the darkness.

Another little boy visited a few minutes later. Before the rainstorm he probably had very impressive facepoint, but half an hour later it looked more like he’d been in either a road traffic accident, or had a very heavy night involving vodka and a hedge. He stammered for quite some time while telling us exactly which character he was.

“I’m… I’m… I’m… umm… I’m… I’m… Huggy Wuggy”.

I thought no more of it until relating the story later in the evening. We looked up “Huggy Wuggy”, and couldn’t quite believe our eyes. It turns out the little boy – no older than maybe five – had dressed as a character from an extremely violent adult horror video game that police have issued warnings about.

Let’s try not to think about that any more.

Anyway.

Today is another day. The first of November! I always feel like there’s something special about crossing from one month into another – and yet all we’ve really done is float a little bit further around our sun.

It’s been raining on-and-off all day. Cold, windy, and grey. In between work I’ve been washing clothes, tidying up, and doing all the other chores that seem to fall upon me these days. I just realised while writing this that I haven’t even looked at my phone all day – I have no idea if anybody has tried to message me (glances at email, and sees a screenfull of unready emails). Oh dear. Do you ever have days when you feel like you’re swimming against the tide? I seem to have had several months of that.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a date with the kettle and the jar of coffee. We’re good friends.

Oh – before I go – given that the world seems to be up-in-arms about certain billionaires buying their social media footprint from under them, I’m tinkering with jonbeckett.blog once again. Feel free to visit. Let’s call it an insurance policy. It struck over the last few days that while everybody seems to be recoiling in horror at Elon buying Twitter, very few people have actually left.