Fitting In and Being Noticed.

I just got back from the Hallowe’en barbecue and bonfire at the village pub. It’s the first time I’ve spent Saturday night fully engaged with the ethos of a den of strong drink and merriment since I last did voluntary work at the theatre in 1997. A brief report:

The interior of the pub was done up as a facsimile of Castle Dracula, albeit a plasticised version, with plastic cobwebs, plastic spiders and… er… lots of other plastic things that I don’t quite remember. Why there were no plastic bats I really don’t know, but there weren’t. And why the children of the night (the barmaids) imagined that disturbingly skimpy bunny girl costumes lent themselves to the ambience of a Transylvanian undead person’s abode, I don’t know either. I just looked the other way and ordered a pint of Marston’s Pedigree Ale. Twice.

The bonfire was big, but hardly attained the definition of bigness established by my own single experience of building a public bonfire back around 1994. It wasn’t quite as hot as I was expecting, and also didn’t last as long. Nevertheless, it was a passable bonfire. And what was really quite interesting were the little vortexes of swirling ash and dust that skipped across the car park as though they had a life of their own. Failing to find an explanation for them, I sought out a science teacher in the assembled multitude and asked him. He couldn’t explain them either, so we settled on the likelihood of them being frolicking sprites from an otherworldly source. He was actually quite liberal as science teachers go.

But here’s the best bit(s)

I got talking to a pretty and personable young woman called Julie, who is the daughter of the woman who lives at the last house before the pub.

‘Are you the gentleman who lives up by the school?’ she asked.

‘No. I’m the bloke who lives up by the school. I’ve never been a gentleman.’

She seemed to like me, but I expect she’d just been taught to be polite to older persons.

And then… and then… I got talking to the redoubtable Christine, whose notoriety has made the pages of this blog before. Christine is even older than me and has lived here all her life, so she knows everybody.

‘Somebody was asking me the other day,’ she began, ‘who that strange man is who lives up by the school. He walks around the lanes all the time and stares at things. (Trees, presumably.) I mean, a man who moves into the village – on his own! I told her you’re very intelligent and it doesn’t matter that you live alone.’

Well thank you, Christine. You made my day.