I Drew This

Little Miss L turned six last week. This meant that a party to celebrate such a milestone would naturally fall on the weekend. Friday being Halloween, it seemed natural to combine the two occasions with a creepy All Hallows Eve/Birthday party.

C was a trooper in getting most of the organising done. She’s rather a star in the party-planning arena and played to her strengths in terms of coordinating the whole thing. We had all sorts of spooky party gear. A chocolate cake with a large jelly spider on top of it; some rather unsavoury lollies including eyeballs, lollipops in the shape of skulls, the old-style teeth—only with vampire fangs; and we even spent an afternoon clearing out the garage, which was then adorned with fake cobwebs, glowing plastic jack-o-lanterns from Cheap as Chips, plastic skeletons and cutouts of bats and witches on brooms. I took the aforementioned confectionery items to the neighbours and asked if they’d be so kind as to be “in” on the trick-or-treating thing. All agreed.

So come Friday after school, the house filled up with 15 or so smallish people, all dressed in their Halloween finest. We had some pizza and some mini-weiners in puff pastry ready to go in the oven and once the kids were all gathered and had collected a bag each, off we went.

The trick-or-treating went as well as can be expected. The birthday girl got a bit bossy towards the end and started to tell the other kids off if they dared ring the doorbell or get their treat before her.

But when we got back, the problems had already started. Though, it wasn’t so much a problem as bad timing. Our plan was to get them back, feed them, then play a few games, have some cake, parents come to collect and they’re off with their bag of bad-taste, sugar enriched loot home to mum & dad. The thing was, the hot food wasn’t, well, hot. It still needed another ten minutes before it could be brought into the garage.

And what are 15 or so kids going to do in a garage at a party at which they’ve just collected a bagful of sugar-enriched loot?

That’s correct. And they did. And all of a sudden, I was helping with the crappy wrappers, getting vampire teeth, disembodied eyeballs and mini-skeletons out of their plastic bags, trays and wrappers. And when they were all just about finished, the hot food came out. And sure, they tucked in to it. It was all good. But the damage had already been done.

So they ate, then played a game or two (involving more sugar) where they had to get in teams and two teammates had to feed jelly to a third, seated teammate.

And then C had to go inside to get the cake ready, so told me to take the kids inside the garage and tell them a spooky story. I thought it would be a good idea to do an equisite corpse kind of thing, where I’d start the story off, and we’d go round the room with each kid adding onto the last bit.

Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a darkened room with 15 kids, smacked up and off their faces from sugar treats, and attempted to get them to sit quietly and, ahem, concentrate on telling a cohesive, linear story but let me just assure you that if you haven’t, it’d probably be easier to get a dozen cats to take a bath.

I started it fine, with some story about a girl dying and coming back as a zombie and trying to find out what killed her. We found out that she died in the bathroom after she’d done a poo. The poo had landed in spider venom that was in the toilet. The spider in question had come from space, in a rocket. No explanation was given as to how the spider got in the toilet, whether it was present when the poo touched the venom and how, indeed, it’s possible for contact between venom and poo to kill the person on the toilet (my favoured theory is some bad chemical reaction that stunk her to death). And it took a while to get even that far. As soon as one kid suggested something, another kid tried to top it with something more outrageous. I had other kids dropping their food on the garage floor and I was having to intervene to make sure they didn’t try to eat a zombie tongue after having it land in the oil spot, one kid was getting all the little cutout bats and rubber spiders from around the room trying to shove them in my pocket (because I was dressed as a vampire and they were “my friends”); the large, car-sized, door of the garage had been covered in black plastic and one girl leaned back on her chair and landed, head outside the plastic (and therefore the room), staring up into the branches of a pine tree (probably too drunk to know what was going on) and meanwhile every other kid was arguing over whether the spider came from Mars or Jupiter.

I’ve never been so happy to see a chocolate cake show up, especially one with a large, jelly spider on top.

This story, about a man flying a Nazi flag in his front yard has caught my attention.

At the risk of contributing more to the obvious offence that something like this would cause, I really can’t see a problem with it.

I have pretty strong civil libertarian leanings: people should be pretty much free to do as they please and I agree with the old “I disagree with what you say but I’ll fight for your right to say it” adage. (I think that’s actually a quote by someone famous—possibly for saying it—but can’t remember who it was.)

So if you want to fly a piece of material up a pole, if that’s your thing, go ahead. I’d much rather people did that than hand out religious propaganda in the streets. Flying a flag is pretty innocuous, as statements go. It’s like painting your house in your football team’s colours: very bad taste but mostly passive and harmless. If the guy is kicking people’s heads in during his spare time, sure, ask him politely to step into the van. But it’s his house, his flag, his flagpole. If you don’t like it, ignore it. Go fly your own flag.

But the RSL response, instead of being offended or “sickened”, I would like to have seen a more enlightened response, along the lines of Voltaire (just looked it up - couldn’t stand not knowing) but with a twist, something like “our servicemen and -women fought for his right to put up whatever flag he wants. It would be nice if he respected those soldiers enough not to put up that one”.

As a postscript, it seems the Attorney-General has paid the man a visit.

Mr Atkinson said the man told him he only put the flag up for a party a few weeks ago and had simply neglected to take it down.

He was also angry at the media for invading his property but accepted that the flag would be offensive to some people.

Which brings to mind adages about books and covers. It also says something about how we, through the media, are quick to polarise an issue. And in a culture that embraces ironic consumption, you just can’t jump to conclusions.

I know there’s a drought, and that, technically, it’s probably illegal to hose down the concrete around your house, but I don’t think what my daughter just smeared on the path is the kind of thing you can clean up with the blower-vac.