Shocking, Scary - It's Halloween

As anyone will know who has read my blog before, I like all those naughty statistics, and yesterday I read the usual offering from John Snow and learned that spending in the UK on Halloween celebration is set to break all previous records this year.  Incredibly, particularly since we are all living through the worst recession for decades, the estimated spend this year on the ghoulish autumn festival is £280,000,000 - yes, two hundred and eighty million pounds.  According to Mr Snow the spend only a decade ago was a miserly 10 million.

Now that is scary.  Particularly when this immense increase seems to me to have been fuelled, like most of our spending decisions, by the twin ugly sisters of ever more sophisticated advertising and the cross party claim that a vote for them (pick your party) is a vote for increased prosperity.

Now I could start on my tree-hugging rant about sustainability - that only an idiot or an economist could believe that growth in any economy can carry on indefinitely - but I'm not going to jump on my green sustainable bandwagon today, honest.  While I was online reading the wise words of Mr Channel Four News I also had a brief chat with an old friend via Facebook.  She said something that gave me a start.  She described Christmas as a time of 'forced consumerism'. Forced?  And where is this force coming from?  I have a great deal of respect for my old friend and accept that if she feels a force then there is one. Can it be the force of expectation? As soon as I typed that, it sounds like it might just be so.

I don't really want to use this blog a great big personal confessional, nor to make the focus of it a 'look at me' egofest - please forgive me if the following seems to be just that - but.... I'm going to jump in the unreliable Tardis that is my memory.

I remember, back in the 1980s and the days of  'greed is good' deciding to sell up in London - tiny flat in Wimbledon and business just down the road - and move to Cornwall.  The business we were running was doing really well.  We had a nanny, a cleaner, a 4x4 car and all that stuff.  The trouble was (and here comes a reference only the over 40s will get) I kept thinking of  Raymond Baxter's claim (presenter of Tomorrow's World in the 60s and 70s) that in the future people would only have to work for 2 or 3 days a week once all sorts of modern technology kicked in.  Then, we (the people of the future) would have lots and lots of leisure time - sounded good to me.  In fact it sounded very good indeed.

I wasn't that surprised to find that quite a number of our peers, including friends we'd made in the business community of SW London thought we were crazy.  One chap, I recall, said we were in danger of playing fast and loose with our children's future.  Blimey, keep your hair on! But in honesty I was aware that we were taking a bit of a gamble, not the least of which was that our children might hate us forever if we subjected them to a life of cheerful penury in the wilds of Cornwall.  As it turned out we took a cut of 90% in our earnings in 1989 from 100K in London to 10K in Cornwall. 

I have been asked before now if that was a scary move and my answer has always been the same. It was blissful.  I'm not going to pretend that sometimes the girls didn't ask for something we just couldn't afford to buy for them - but I'm guessing that unless you are actually in possession of all the money in the world that applies to any parents - but I don't recall any major sulks or arguments about 'things'.  Jessica and Megan were good enough to allow me to dress them up (for Halloween - not all the time) in strange outfits concocted out of found objects, old clothes and once a gooey mix of flour and water blobbed liberally over a long suffering Jessica/Zombie. Perhaps I was too busy enjoying myself that I didn't notice them feeling unhappy and deprived, but I really don't think that is the case.  We made lots of things to give each other for Christmas and Birthdays, rarely buying cards or presents... you get the picture.

This was happening as the power of ads was increasing at an alarming rate.  Adverts so glossy you didn't always catch the subtext - if you don't buy this, do this, give this you are not a proper person.  Of course when it comes to tweaking the guilt of parents it must be a doddle.  I've never liked the 'voice of authority' much and most definitely when said voice is issuing from the office of some overpaid advertising executive. 

Are todays children actually happier than we were as children when a trip in a car was a novelty, cardboard snakes and ladders promoted squeals of delight and school uniforms were actually erm, uniform?  If you've followed the urgings of those glossy commercials then we might expect the answer to be that the modern day little darlings are delirious, overjoyed, contented, stimulated and, of course, grateful to their indulgent parents,  that the £280,000,000 spent on Halloween this year meant that children had good fun 28 times better than the one they had 10 years ago.

I'm not going to claim that I can quantify happiness.  I really don't know how.  But I am ready and waiting to get mixing up the goo, locate the round-ended scissors and the coloured tissue paper ready for the arrival of our grandchildren.