Personally, I believe I speak for many of my countrymen and women when I declare -- with all the combined instinctual and intellectual passion I can muster in order to respond to the subject matter with the appropriate and augmentative degrees of seriousness and sincerity -- that this damnable, yes DAMNABLE, and pernicious influence upon the various customs and associations learned by every schoolchild, and keenly-received by those with an inherent curiosity about what we may here summarise as 'the Night Side Of Nature', and which are practised up and down the British Isles in various generally-understood ways and in unique forms in isolated communities, has now extended to the practice of donning a disguise that is inappropriate when marking Hallowe'en, that mysterious, much-anticipated and in some quarters still actively feared night of the year upon which the boundaries between the world we normally inhabit and understand and the worlds and planes beyond our comprehension grow thin and permeable, allowing entities not of this world to manifest their presence upon the earth in various unique and awful ways, striking fear into the hearts of all God-abiding citizens and threatening personal translation to the realms inhabited by tormented spirits for such unfortunate individuals who respect not the commandments are regard the certainty of life eternal beyond the grave as a disregardable trifle when compared to their earthly preoccupations with sins of the flesh, with free use of spirituous liquors and the pursuit of fleshly pleasures at each and every opportunity, for whom All Saints' Day has a particular fascination, offering as it does a potential glimpse into the dismal and perpetual fate to which the habitual sinner unknowingly consigns himself with each fresh opportunity for free expression and indulgence of the senses.
Consequently and due to its mysterious qualities, All Hallows' Eve is typically marked among the young by the donning of various costumes and disguises, with the general aim of passing oneself off as an otherworldly or supernatural being. Ghosts are chief among these, being the easiest costume to improvise, but we may also see among the dusky games and ceremonies, representations of vampyres, portrayals of ghouls and similarly ambulant corpses, or undefined monsters of all sorts, whose form is determined solely by the individuals whims with regard to creating as fearsome an aspect as may be attained.
To come to my point: Hallowe'en is NOT an occasion for a fancy-dress party without regard for the solemn occasion observed; Would be guisers or 'trick or treaters' should NOT be abroad wearing superhero costumes or otherwise inappropriate garb. I believe that the rot started with the success in British box office terms of Mr Speilberg's diverting kinematographic presentation entitled "ET: The Extra-Terrestrial". The details of the narrative flow presented within this moving picture need not detain us here, but suffice it to say that the film contained a lengthy sequence depicting what was presented as a typical Hallowe'en night. Children went dressed as astronauts and other socially incongruous characters, with nary a trace detectable of the inherently mysterious and otherworldly aspects that are rightfully in the minds of all at the appropriate time of year.
And now I learn that two British students -- British students -- have managed to offend public sensibilities while also devaluing the inherently mysterious nature of Hallowe'en, by going to a 'fancy dress ball' disguised as a terrorist atrocity!
Surely the time has come to say: Enough! Let us return to our hobgoblins, our witches, our demons, our nightmares and incubi with which Hallowe'en is properly populated.
Let us stamp out the influence upon these shores of the degraded and spiritually-worthless manifestations of Hallowe'en among the former colonies, and return once more to the contemplation of the numinious,, the inexplicable, the ghastly, the uncanny and all those species of mysteries which crowd into the head of the typical Englishman or woman when the dread occasion, rolls round yet again, threatening further interactions between this realm and others yet unknown.
Now, all stand for the National Anthem.
06 Nov 2013, 7:43 pm
