h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

So here we are on November 1st *again*. Every year, just like clockwork.

Anyway, one of the things I rarely do at this time of year is mention Halloween. That was so last month. But here goes.

[Brief pause while I go and fish some poo out of the Comet's bath.]

I like Halloween. So we had the neighbours round last night, and got dressed up and so on. The Star was a vampire bat. I am getting quite good at drawing teeth dripping with blood on children's faces. The Comet was supposed to be an evil butterfly but she didn't want to wear her wings so what she mostly looked like was a small enraged Pict, blue being her facepaint of choice. I got carried away and went green, with black trimming round the eyes and mouth. A `witch's outfit is very easy to rustle up when your preferred wardrobe colour is black. Still, next year I think we will try a bit harder. I fancy some tights with cobwebs on.

[Brief pause while I go and decant the Star into the bath.]

The downside to inviting the neighbours round, or rather the neighbours' children, is that today the house looks a little the worse for wear. Still, I can take comfort from the fact that for once I did not bother to spend hours cleaning before having people round, so I am not sure there is a vast amount of difference.

[Brief pause while I go and stop the kids from drowning each other in the bath.]

The upside is that all of us flaked out at 8pm last night and didn't wake up until 8am today. Well, B had to get up at 5, but that's his problem. I am feeling just about strong enough to actually tackle the mess. Wish me luck.

[Prolonged wet and angry sounds from the bathroom while I wash the children's hair.]

I love children, and even teenagers. I can sit and listen to people talk about them for hours.

reddit

so much more interesting than my first November journal entry the party sounds fun.... goodluck with the cleaning up

We made the children watch Thriller, which I have never seen all the way through, and then I made everyone watch the Time Warp, which the adults had never seen due to being foreign. I can see a Rocky Horror evening looming in our neighbourhood.

rocky horror is good

I still find thriller too scary!

The 80s trousers, jackets and hair make it seem a bit ridiculous if you ask me. Not the first time you see it, but then.......

Sounds like a blast! We prefer Vampires Rock, but that's probably due to the soundtrack and the chance to dress up at a concert!

Looking forward to more journals from you Sol

When my girls were home we always used to watch Nightmare Before Christmas. We never really worked out whether it was a Christmas or Halloween film, but it became a tradition for a few years.

Halloween sounds fun!

There's a Shrek version of Thriller on YouTube--just discovered it today

I'm here!

F S

I don't really "do" halloween but I generally have a big bowl of sweets by the door on the night for any trick or treaters. Mostly it's small children with parents lurking at the bottom of the drive.

I don't mind it as long as it's on the night. What drives me mad are the people who come knocking on the nights round about it - I'm always nervbous of tricks being played because I've said "I'm sorry, it's not Halloween, I don't have any treats, but come back at the 31st and I will have".

Nice entertaining journal, Sol, looking forward to reading more.

Deb

When I was young we used to all go out on Beggars' night http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beggars_Night

I was born and lived the first 11 or so years of my life in Buffalo, NY. My brother and I, along with most of the kids in our neighbourhood took the night before Halloween to go to the next block where we did not know too many people, and save our own block for Halloween itself. We were not malicious, we only played tricks on people who had been mean to us. When we moved to Florida it took only a few houses to learn that our old custom was a very local one.

F S

Day 2

I have reached that stage in my son’s life where I spend a fair amount of time hanging around waiting for him to finish pony riding/ basketweaving/ axemurdering/ treespotting classes and the like. Although sadly I don’t just get to sit around drinking coffee and reading pulp fiction, because my daughter needs entertaining. Currently I am holed up watching her sleep near Imperial College, London, which is where my son is attending classes*. I’d like to say he is doing the ‘coding dojo’ event they seem to run regularly for precocious and mathematically inclined youngsters, but actually he is just at Russian school, currently relocated from its usual spot in the Russian Orthodox cathedral nearby because the cathedral has spent the last year having marble cladding and, if I know Russians, gold leaf put in to smother the building’s rampantly non-conformist protestant origins.

Anyway, I am now quite familiar with most of what Imperial College has to offer in the way of both architecture and amenities because the school tends to get whatever rooms are not in use by more important events that week, and moves around a lot. In a frequently vain attempt to tire daughter out enough to go to sleep, we go exploring in the lifts and round the quadrangles. Sometimes, of course, we also venture down to the museums on the same street, but there is a limit to how many times I want to look at the diorama of the V2 rockets in the Science Museum, which has now inexplicably fascinated both my children above all else there, play hide and seek amongst the statues in the V&A and stand in the queue for the Natural History Museum, not least because all of these places are absolutely rammed at midday on a Saturday. We’d go to Hyde Park, but that means walking past the ice cream van, and it is astonishing how loud my daughter can scream.

So the highways and byways of a higher education college it is. And one which I am particularly pleased to get to nose round because the façade on Exhibition Road, all glass fronted and metal columned with a statue of Queen Vic lurking in the background in such a way to lend a very pleasing touch of steampunk to the whole, is one I have always rather admired. Sadly, I am not pleased to report that behind this are a whole bunch of very ugly seventies tower blocks, including the Electrical Engineering building where my son is right now. They have covered some of them with brightly coloured plastic screens, but there is really no disguising such ugliness from someone who has the connoisseurs’ eye of a previous inhabitant of S__________.

Mind you, the Electrical Engineering building is also quite high, so if you go all the way up to the top you get an excellent view over this part of West London. I highly recommend that you do this if you should ever find yourself in my position. There is also the original college clock in full working condition, innards on display, on your right as you exit. Yes, the excitement will probably kill you.

I also recommend that if you should ever be in the School of Mines, you visit the geology department. It is full of posters for really cool field trips. My mother is a geologist by degree. I now quite understand why, although in her day they mostly went to Wales rather than Morocco. Of course, last week, if you stood outside the School of Mines, you would have been able to watch a man come flying through one of their ground floor windows. Very impressive. Glass everywhere. If we’d have hung around, I daresay he’d have done it again, but it looked like the film unit would be spending quite a while setting it up, so we moved on. I suspect the School of Mines was masquerading as a monolithic but faceless government building, a role it performs very well on the whole. Everyone should look out for it in a spy film called ‘Secret Service’.

Of course, they’ll have edited out the large sculptures of heroic miners from the entrance. Although I do wonder what the swords, bare breasts, armour and grapes add, symbolically like, to the men with spades.

Never recommend your future 19 year olds to get a uni place in whatever department occupies the Skempton Building. There is nowhere to sit, no visible refreshments, people can walk right past and stare at you while you are in class and it is frequently extremely overheated. Plus, everytime my son is cloistered there is pisses down with rain outside, which naturally curtails my and my daughter’s wanderings. The Huxley building is much better, not least because they have a pleasant place to hang out right next to computer generated art work and vending machines which produce coffee, or, for my son’s enjoyment, hot chocolate. More vending machines would generally be an improvement to the place, actually. There are a fair number of cafes dotted around, but they always seem to be closed on a Saturday, for some reason.

Still, that does leave me with an excuse to go up to the Royal Albert Hall and their coffee café there. Which is what I am going to do now, before my daughter wakes up (hopefully) and before those ominous black clouds let loose (even more hopefully).

*No wifi access though, so this is being prepared for your reading pleasure via the power of Word.