Pumpkins, perverts and parental input

With the all-embracing festival of kitsch that is Halloween fast approaching, the opportunities for the maladjusted to get things wrong by trying too hard become almost infinite. But you have a go, because nothing says community spirit like a tramp round a dark, deserted housing estate with shivering, whingeing children who would rather be inside watching telly. And you'd be fed up too if you had to keep bending over to pick up the fake rubber teeth which fell out of your mouth every time you opened it to say 'Twick or Tweat'.

Last year I was invited to join the annual cavalcade of misery known in our town as the 'Halloween Parade' which was organised by a local charity, and intended as a grand evening out for all the family. So naturally I braced myself, had a look at my options, and decided to go as a pumpkin. I opted for pumpkin because (a) I was the right shape and (b) We had loads of orange foam packaging left over from a patio set we bought in August. The kids were very supportive and told me I'd be winning prizes all night for the most realistic costume in the mothers' category, so when the doorbell rang and I waddled down the hall, like Mr Bump, to meet my public, it honestly hadn't occurred to me to be worried. They already knew I was fat, so they wouldn't be expecting much, surely?

I opened the door to be confronted by what, in my panic, looked initially to be a raiding party from Ann Summers. There were about twenty women all dressed as sexy zombies, sexy bats, or sexy vampires. Some were wearing lace cobweb bras over black velvet leotards. Others had squeezed themselves into basques onto which they'd stuck little Halloween-themed trinkets. One of the boldest of the party was sporting a French maid's outfit, fishnet stockings and thigh boots. Her son was wearing a Scream mask and an Incredible Hulk suit and the picture of them walking hand in hand past Blockbusters will stay with me until I draw my final breath. Obviously, being bright orange and having a circumference of at least 3.5 metres, I was not in a position to ask searching questions about people's sartorial choices, so I never did discover the link between All Hallow's Eve and bedroom roleplay. But there must have been one because these things don't happen by accident do they? Anyway, no-one had told me but Halloween, apparently, was now all about sex. Of course! Cute sexy ghosts in see-through sheets, burlesque witches in nipple clamps, 50 shades of grey cat. Go for it girls! I felt great in my pumpkin outfit, and happily joined the insane throng with a merry laugh and a spring in my step.

Needless to add that after that experience, I thought long and hard about what I was going to do this year...

 

I'm desperate and I know it

.... When you're a woman of the larger pursuasion, and by that I mean fat, you do get quite good at sourcing poor-quality, ill-fitting clothing in man-made fabrics from dubious websites. These tend to have one-word titles and use lots of exclamation marks to convey the excitement of being too big to buy real clothes in normal sizes from High Street chains. Fat!! It's the new thin! That sort of thing. And awful euphemisms like 'curvilicious', 'billowing ' and 'extravagant'. Like that. But the handy thing about them when you're looking for something that might double as a Halloween costume is that most of the clothes are black (so you can tell yourself that those capri pants make you look like Margot Fonteyn on her way to rehearsal, or a backstage hairdresser at the Brit Awards) and all of them contain lycra, and so are shiny, which is ideal if you're going to have a stab at Catwoman.

I probably don't need to dwell too long on the detail, but when my purchases arrived, and I'd got them all on, the resulting ensemble didn't say 'cuddly but cute' like a pre-diet Dawn French. It said '60-year old Grimsby prostitute' and if I'm honest, it said it quite loudly. Actually, once I'd added the cape, things improved slightly, and I could have probably passed for Russell Grant as Buttons in Aladdin. But then I spoiled things again by going over the top with the eyeliner and backcombing my hair... Six hours later and my eldest daughter was locked in the bathroom texting her friends and stuffing towels into her mouth to silence the laughter, while my youngest was crying, and too terrified to come into my bedroom. At my weight, it's not possible to look exactly like a methodone addict with a taste for the carnival, but I wouldn't have looked out of place in one of Tim Burton's worst nightmares, even one he'd had after a particularly heavy night on the cheese and pickle sandwiches.

Things were much better in the Olden Days

So obviously sexy's not for me, and I'll probably be staying in this year. Which after all is what everyone's mum used to do isn't it? When we were little, our mothers and fathers didn't have to dress up at Halloween. They came out with us to make sure we weren't run over in the dark, but they stood out of the way, at the ends of people's drives, trying to light a crafty fag inside the collars of their macs. That was because, in our mam's case (yes, we call them 'mam' in Middlesbrough - like they did in the Royle Family - aren't we quaint?) the hard work had already been done during the day while we were at school.

All afternoon, our mam had been hunched over the kitchen table, frantically digging out the insides of two swedes with a sharp vegetable knife. Yes, I said swedes. Swedes! I have trouble even chopping them up for a stew, they're so hard. But pumpkins hadn't arrived in Britain in the late seventies and early eighties, or not in Middlesbrough anyway, so that's what was used. Once she'd finished hollowing them out, she carved a scary face on the front, threaded a piece of string through two holes in the 'lid' and finally inserted a birthday cake candle inside. And there you had it! My sister and I were now the proud owners of what were basically illuminated vegetable handbags, which we would then carry through the night, dressed as witches, accompanied by the smell of burnt turnip, and developing welts on our fingers where the string dug in.

The more alert reader will have noticed that I said 'burnt turnip' not 'swede' just then. That was because the other special thing about swedes in our house was that they were called turnips. And they weren't turnips, they were swedes. I know that now because I'm almost grown-up and do my own food shopping. But mam insisted they were turnips, and we all called them turnips and I didn't realise they were called anything but turnips until I went away to university aged 18. Imagine my embarrassment! Actually, there wasn't any because the subject never came up, as we never ate any vegetables. I'm assuming all the middle class students knew the difference between a swede and a turnip because a middle class person simply would not make that sort of mistake. But they probably don't get to make handbags out of root vegetables either, not even at Halloween.