Sweet memories before Americanisation

Halloween, or All Saint’s Eve was never a big festival in England. Visions of children dressed up in frightening costumes going out after dark to ‘trick-or-treat’ their neighbours was a typical sight in the United States but not on this side of the pond.

Instead it was far more common to have children coming around at the same time of the year asking for ‘a penny for the guy’.

They would then build an effigy of Guy Fawkes which would be placed on top of a bonfire and burnt on November 5 to mark the foiling of the gunpowder plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament.

Throughout my childhood I remember attending bonfire parties at friends homes as bonfires were lit in back gardens and mums warmed us on bitterly cold nights with hot soup and baked potatoes and dad’s let off fireworks.

But that was the age before Globalisation — or should I say Americanisation, and the commercialisation that goes with it.

Now the shops are full of costumes for youngsters to dress up as ghosts and ghouls, witches and warlocks and Guy Fawkes has completely disappeared.

“My bestfriend Kaniaya is coming as a werewolf, and I want to dress up as black Spiderman,” said my six-year-old nephew Ayaaz,” as we wandered round the shops looking for costumes.

Come Halloween and ‘trick-or-treaters’ litter the streets and beware if they come to your home. If you do not have any sweets to give them, you might find a broken egg on your window.

While the sight of toddlers dressed up can be cute, teenagers with Scream masks demanding the same is intimidating when they turn up unannounced, particularly with teenage crime soaring in the UK.

Hence when we shifted into the upmarket Hatch End area of North London this year we found that parents had devised a civilised code even for trick-or-treaters.

A lit pumpkin in the window means that witches are welcome to ring the doorbell.

And as for the poor Guy, bonfires have been replaced by firework displays in parks and common grounds where parents can take children to watch from a safe distance — but at a price of course.

That is not to say that fireworks being left off in back gardens are completely a thing
of the past.

With Diwali falling so close to Guy Fawkes day, Indians light up the night sky with rockets and sparklers instead.
 
I know that the richest man in the UK is Indian — steel tycoon Lakshmi Mittal — but I was not aware that richest man in the world was also Indian.

So imagine my surprise when I saw an article in The Daily Mail emphatically telling me that Mukesh Ambani had outstripped American billionaires Bill Gates and Warren Buffet with his vast fortune.

The newspaper was so confident of Ambani’s new status that it was not even the focus of the article but instead the story talked about he was building a new 60-storey home in Mumbai.

Astonished how I had missed the new rich list I looked for the source of the rankings and surprisingly the paper did not mention which organisation had put Ambani’s “£31 billion fortune” at the number one place.

I discovered that they had picked up the story from the Indian media without trying to verify the facts for themselves. A clear case of why one shouldn’t trust everything on the Internet!