Hallowe'en

 Hallowe'en

• What's your favourite scary movie?
• What's your favourite Halloween treat to eat?
• If you like to dress up, what has been your best Halloween costume? 

Like several others here (a small online community), my family does not celebrate Hallowe'en. I am not comfortable with its identity with death, fear and evil, even if only play-acting.

Neither am I keen on scary movies. However, there are two scary movies to which I am attracted: 'Wolf' (1994), directed by Mike Nichols, starring Jack Nicholson, Michelle Pfeiffer and James Spader, and 'The Ninth Gate' (1999), directed by Roman Polanski, starring Johnny Depp. I have also watched 'Sleepy Hollow' (1999), directed by Tim Burton, and also starring Johnny Depp (I am by no means a Johnny Depp fan), on several occasions, and in some respects fits in better with the Hallowe'en theme, although it is not really a scary movie.

As we do not celebrate Hallowe'en, treat is hardly the correct term. As part of our commitment to 'saving the planet', we grow as much of our fruit and vegetable requirement as we are able. This includes plenty of pumpkins. I make a gorgeous pumpkin soup. I also roast pumpkin in the oven. Best of all is my wife's pumpkin pie. It grieves me to see how much pumpkin goes to waste, thrown out after having been carved into a ghoulish face and displayed for an evening or two on the windowsill or on the doorstep.

I rarely dress up, and then only for weddings and funerals. I recognise that other people get enjoyment out of dressing up. I have known well only one cross-dresser, whose personality and identity was explored, and in part realised, by dressing in clothes identified with the other sex/gender. I get my enjoyment, in part, by watching movies (and, in the past, theatrical performances), an activity that requires the actors to disguise their real personality in order to play the role of a character. I am not a playful person. There is, these days, much criticism of "people who take themselves too seriously", and praise for people who laugh at themselves. The television and radio schedules are overflowing with humorous entertainment, even on news programmes, and it seems that a significant proportion of young people want to work as a 'stand-up comedian'. I hope that, in time, the pendulum will swing back in the other direction, and people are encouraged to embrace the complexities of (modern) life instead of simply laughing at it as a form of rejection. I am not against humour at all, but I am fed up with how it seems to have infected the entire public domain - the Prime Minister seems to be incapable of giving a speech without including jokes, puns and humorous allusions.

When I was in Japan in August 2008, we were in Kyoto at the time of the celebration of Obon festival: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gozan_no_Okuribi

I was moved and impressed by how seriously it appeared to be taken. It seems to me that setting aside a day (such as 2 November: All Souls Day) on which to remember the lives of now-departed family and friends would add much to a sense of community, not least in providing opportunities to support those who are alone due to bereavement.