Hallowe'en

Night drew in at half five: when I walked up the hill alone in the dark, the shadows and whispers of ghosts were deviated from somewhat by the entirely-earthly shrieks of the couple having a domestic dispute in the middle of the road, accompanied by the shouting, horn-blasting and general malevolence of the people in the six cars snarled up in either direction and the houses on either side.

I am feeling somewhat jittery tonight, and while it is probably something to do with a) the remaining alcohol in my bloodstream and b) that Sunday evening feeling (raised by a power, don't wanna go to school after reading week do not want) but it's much more poetic to stare out the window at the lights cutting ineffectually into the night and think delicious ghost-story type thoughts. I do love Hallowe'en - not so much the dressing up, and I never went trick-or-treating as a small thing - but the idea of it, which strikes me as rather a lot like Diwali: we dress up as the scary things so they are not scary, we light candles in the darkness so it is not scary, we take the masks off and it's just us underneath and there's nothing to be afraid of.

(Speaking of which: Private Eye's cover this week is a cut-out-and-keep Nick Griffin mask. It has no eyes. There's nothing to be afraid of.)

Anyway, jacinthsong came round last night and we got dressed up. She dressed up as Willow, who looks like this. I dressed up as vamp Willow, who looks like this (and that's her in the icon, incidentally). Together, we looked... well, we looked kind of amazing. (Laura had spent a long time getting the right fuzziness of jumper; I had spent a lot of time staring disdainfully at my own cleavage.)

Thus attired, we went out to sir_rosealot's Hallowe'en party, and I have never gone outside in PVC leggings before, but mostly, I think I endorse the experience. And it was a lovely party. On the way through the city we saw a lot of people in mostly quite generic Frankenstein's monster costumes and whatnot - although Laura did note on the bus, "That guy. Is he dressed as a zombie or Yasser Arafat?" - but the party was much better in that regard. I liked osymandias as Death; as he couldn't find a scythe, he had decided to use a hoe on the dead instead. ("Oh!" said someone at this point. "People always sing about those, and now I know what one is!") There were a lot of vampire hunters to go with the various vampires, and deathbyshinies won the costume competition by dressing as webcomic character I do not know, but by doing it with aplomb. My main difficulty with being dressed as a vampire was the fact the plastic fangs were actually designed for children, and I kept having to put my teeth back in; which is not, I observed at the time, something I planned to do for another fifty years yet.

(Also, shimgray had a genius costume idea which he did not then implement, much to my chagrin; it involved a pith helmet, a cream jacket, a white shirt, brown trousers and a piece of sugar cane. For Hallowe'en, right, you should come as something scary, and what's more scary than colonialism?

...he said it might be offensive. Sigh.)

But yes, it was a lovely party. About halfway through we started playing Spin the Bottle - which was... well, people took turns spinning the bottle, and I happened to be the first person it landed on, so I kissed the nice man who'd spun it, and then I spun it, and kissed the nice girl it landed on, who then spun it on. When nice men kissed other men, there was a little more general approbation than in the other cases; at the end I realised I hadn't kissed sebastienne, so I asked her nicely. In other words - I think I like this game a lot better now I am not fourteen. The very-well spun bottle of pina colada was also nice.

We finally staggered home about three in the morning, having reached that delightful stage of the evening where the party is squished on a sofa far too small for it, and thus obliged to interlock in new and interesting ways. Today has been a splendidly do-nothing Sunday, underscored by minor fear re: schooooool, and also, I have to clean the bathroom. Turns out enormous quantities of red hairspray do no good to porcelain or soft furnishings. But on the whole I don't mind at all. It was a lovely night, and for our next dressing-up extravaganza jacinthsong and I have resolved to go as Kira Nerys and the Intendant. No points at all for guessing which is which.

It is dark outside, and the cats are prowling about: I occasionally see a pair of bright eyes beneath the window and then a flash of movement (and, let's face it, probably a dead rodent). It's nice and well-lit in here, though, and I'm being a bad girl and burning tealights as an expression of my religious tradition. So, flist, if you would like, tell me ghost stories.

Edited to add: I forgot to put my own ghost story in! This one is one my father tells, but I've always tended to co-opt it.

About the first thing I can remember is my father working at Mill Road, in Anfield. There hasn't been a hospital there for many years now, but in the late eighties there were still these small, Victorian-built hospitals all over the city, and Mill Road was just like all of them were, old brick and solidly built, and what I remember of it is mostly high ceilings and wide open space.

The labour ward was where my father was working at the time, and he used to do the morning rounds, just as the patients were waking up and the shifts were rotating. And fairly often they used to say, you must thank the night nurse. She came and she gave me some water in the night; I can't see her this morning, she was wearing a different uniform from the day nurses; thank her for me, Doctor. My father always promised them that he would.

Liverpool is a port city. During the Second World War, it was bombed eighty-three times - once at Mill Road, where the nurses tended to the victims all night. And my father never told his patients that on the labour ward in the late ninteen-eighties, there were no night nurses.