At a friend\u2019s birthday party recently, I got talking to a man about my broken dishwasher. Party chat can take you to all sorts of unexpected places. I can\u2019t remember why I mentioned the dishwasher in the first place. I must have been desperate. I get bored easily and usually try to elevate Small Talk to Big Talk as soon as possible but sometimes \u201cmy dishwasher is broken\u201d, which might be described as Middle of the Road Talk, works too. It turned out to be an unexpectedly rich seam on this occasion. <\/p>\n
The dishwasher had broken that morning. After preparing a post-sleepover brunch of bacon, eggs, sausages and beans, I asked four teenagers to unload and then load it again, and somewhere in the course of this activity a part fell off the dishwasher and the top shelf got stuck. The dishwasher wouldn\u2019t close and the prospect of washing dishes by hand as in days of yore loomed scarily in front of us. I know it\u2019s spooky season but a broken dishwasher, now that\u2019s a real horror story.<\/p>\n
The man at the party said the exact same thing had happened to him recently. \u201cThe top shelf?\u201d I checked. \u201cYes a white part fell off. But,\u201d he said triumphantly. \u201cI took a photograph of it, uploaded it and the AI told me how to fix my dishwasher.\u201d Increasingly these days, I find myself thinking \u2018I am living in the future and it is mental.\u2019 But that might be just me.<\/p>\n
At the same party I got talking to people of all ages about Halloween costumes. There was the octogenarian who said that when she was a little girl growing up in Longford and Monaghan in the 1950s there was no dressing up, only basins of water for apple dunking and maybe a slice of barmbrack if you were lucky. <\/p>\n
There was an effervescent woman in her early 70s who remembered dressing up as a Muslim woman in 1975. Cultural appropriation was not a thing back then. She thought she was only marvellous rocking a full burka and face covering at a party. \u201cBut nobody asked me to dance all night,\u201d she said still, decades later, sounding slightly surprised by this turn of events. Then there was the teenager who showed me a photo of her skin-tight yellow Uma Thurman Kill Bill costume. I\u2019d have killed Bill and several others to have ever had the nerve to wear a thing like that.<\/p>\n
When I got home that night I decided to get the AI to fix my dishwasher. I took photos and uploaded them and chatted to a robot while my daughters laughed at me. We\u2019ve been having a lot of chats about Halloween costumes. Their approach to dressing up for Halloween is using clothes they already have or borrow from friends to create fancy dress gear. Going as a cat? Wear a little black dress, throw on a pair of cat ears and paint on whiskers with eyeliner. Going as a Tin Woman? A silver minidress with a few bangles and a silver party hat will do the job. <\/p>\n
Halloween is not what it used to be and that\u2019s no harm. For years I was either a witch or a ghost and, once, a rabbit. The witch costume involved a home-made cardboard pointy hat and black plastic bags, the ghost was a sheet with holes for the eyes. The haul after you\u2019d been around the houses was mostly apples or monkey nuts. The big houses sometimes threw in a Curly Wurly or a Chomp or a packet of Chipsticks. Good times.<\/p>\n
[\u00a0Polyester Halloween costumes are scarily bad for the environment. Try a swap shopOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n Regarding the \u201ccostumes\u201d, my teenagers tell me I just don\u2019t get it. And they are right. I don\u2019t. But I am trying. A much cooler friend tells me a lot of Halloween dressing up is ironically \u201csexy\u201d. A friend\u2019s daughter, for example, is going as a Sexy Pumpkin. It will probably involve a corset and fishnets, as is the way with all Sexy Veg. Her son is going as Indiana Jones and she is going as Indiana Jones\u2019s Mam. \u201cIndiana Jones\u2019s Sexy Mam?\u201d I asked. She claims not, but then sent me a video of her practising with an impressive looking bull whip in her back garden so I\u2019m not sure. <\/p>\n Another friend\u2019s daughter is going as a Sexy Boxer. I\u2019ve heard of someone going as a Sexy Remote Control. Sexy Broken Dishwasher might even cut it these days. It\u2019s ironic. It\u2019s the future. Anything goes.<\/p>\n