We’ve just had a few days in Scotland. Despite my DH having a new knee and not being in peak physical condition (that’s irony), we got out and about and enjoyed ourselves.
He wasn’t able to walk far so one day we parked at Kippford, a little sailing village and while he sat on a bench I walked to Rockliffe, a couple of miles away. I walked back through the woods but stopped mid-stride when I noticed something. In front of me on the path was an adder. Now, I’m not frightened of snakes and was pleased to see it. I watched and waited for it to wriggle away. It did not. It was dead, or playing dead – or resting as Monty Python might have suggested. I debated whether to give it a little poke with a stick, but was deterred by images of cobras rising up to strike, so I just stared at it and then took a photo. It still did not move and I walked on. What I should have done was go back a few minutes later and see if it was still there, but I didn’t, so I shall never know the fate of the adder.
We returned from our break and found that the garden was amok with its own wild life: squirrels, pheasants, and rabbits that had been eating the apples lying on the ground.
Once those apples would have been put to good use at Hallow’een. Decades ago in those golden, olden days when children enjoyed being sent up chimneys, Hallow’een meant bobbing for apples and carving rock-hard swedes into lanterns (pumpkins only featured in Cinderella). Fancy costumes were not involved and trick or treating hadn’t been invented.
I blame ET. The minute we watched that film and tried to work out why those American children were dressing up we were stuffed; the end of innocence was here; Eden was over; realisation dawned. Apparently we had been doing things wrong for hundreds of years. We needed to catch up. Big Business saw the opportunity and persuaded us that turnip lanterns were old hat and apple bobbing merited a preservation order, and sold us the event of Hallow’een. We fell for it big time. After that it was Baby Showers, Hen Parties, Expensive Weddings! Money was not only talking, it was using a megaphone, and the message was clear.
“The world is too much with us, getting and spending” Wordsworth said. Grumpy old Old W.W was a bit of a prophet; the getting and spending is definitely here. The shops are full of tat: black plastic bats (the flying kind, not the cricket sort), skulls, plastic skeletons, spray-on cobwebs, imitation blood.
It makes me yearn for a simpler time, when children watched adders instead of Xboxes. I can’t make that happen but I can retreat into my own made-up world where children have adventures and I rule their lives in a benevolent fashion.
