Halloween has been getting bigger than ever in the UK in recent years, and while some bemoan this as yet another ‘Americanisation’, and regret that our English Bonfire Night festivities are getting forgotten in the carnival of plastic skeletons and ghosts, I like Halloween, and anyway, we had our own Halloween here on this little island long before it started to be a ‘thing’ in America.  The Celts were celebrating ‘Samhain’ thousands of years ago.  Go to Edinburgh, where I used to live, around this time and you’ll see the Samahun Fire Festival in Holyrood Park, where dozens of drummers and fire dancers gather to perform before huge crowds, and before, so rumour has it, disappearing off into the night, post performance, to the Samahun sex parties of the wild and unleashed.  

I like Halloween because it normalises darkness.  It’s one of the rare times in the year when we admit that the dark and creepy side of life exists too, and it’s in us.  True horror begins in our own minds.  I’ve got to admit, I’m not a huge fan of the mental-health-aware age we now find ourselves living in.  I can see that an open discussion around mental health does some good, but I fear it also presupposes that there is some normal and stable state which we should all be aspiring to live in, all of the time, and that any deviation from that is cause for alarm.  If there is an Americanisation I fear, it is man’s God-given right to the ‘pursuit of happiness’.  My dad used to say that happiness isn’t something you can aspire to, it’s like the weather, it comes and it goes.  I do and don’t agree with him but I see his point and think it’s a useful one to remember these days.  You can spend a lot of time, money and energy trying to be mentally healthy all the time.  I mean, it would be nice never to get a cold or the flu or a winter vomiting virus but I don’t expect that to happen.  People do die of the flu and you can get yourself vaccinated if you’re vulnerable, but even with the vaccinations on offer, people still do die because we are human, we live in time, with seasons, and in winter in the north of the northern hemisphere it gets cold and dark and the frail and weak are left exposed.  We are, I believe, part animal, part spirit.  

Apparently we are living in an age of an alarming level of mental unhealth.  I am not sure about that.  I am a fan of the work of the late Sstatistician Hans Rosling.  His book ‘Factfulness, Ten reasons we’re wrong about the world - and why things are better than we think’ provides a data driven account of why and how living standards have improved globally more in the past hundred years than ever before.  We have flu vaccines!  We have holidays!  We have democracy! Contraception! Free education!  Aeroplanes!  We no longer have to marry our cousins!  When things are that good, one might be forgiven for seeing our unhappinesses as being supremely wrong.  I see happiness and unhappiness as part of being alive, and yes, some people die of unhappiness and some people die of flu and both cases are best avoided if possible but we all will die in the end.  Halloween reminds us in its fun and gruesome ways that nothing lasts forever, neither the good times nor the bad, and least of all us.  

I promise that for this year this will be the last time I signpost you towards my music video ‘Halloween’.  If you would watch the video, like, subscribe, or find my music on your favourite music streamer, you might actually make me very happy.