Happy Halloween!

It is Halloween! Or as I like to say it (in my spooky voice) 'All Hallooooooow's Eve!' London is especially spooky tonight. It is shrouded in at thick fog and since I did not pay enough attention in Geography class, I have no idea what science / weather combination-thingy would cause such a phenomenon. But I can say it has been quite a while since I have seen such white and dense fog in my hometown. And makes my familiar streets and parks look creepy as hell.

Today we spent the afternoon and evening watching the Rugby World Cup final (well done New Zealand All Blacks!) with my parents. Mr C deftly explained the finer points of rugby to my father, who exclaimed repeatedly, 'It just looks like chaos to me!' After talking up a storm about every subject known to man (as we usually do with my family) and consuming chicken kiev with rice and a bowl of impossibly large grapes, we embarked on the short drive home and out into the night of spooky fog. Fog has a strange effect. It seems to elongate all the light from the street lamps, the sidewalks look soft and the trees appear fuzzy. The night seems darker, velvet black and more rich and even more frightening. Perfect for Halloween. It did not help that at every bus stop, young people in terrifying costumes and painted in fake blood congregated, drunk and merry, waiting for a bus to take them home. Any costume you can think of, we saw as we drove past. Dead nurses, several werewolves, a couple of suave Draculas and even, what appeared to be, a version of the Disney character Maleficent. They stepped out into traffic, caught in the beams of foggy headlights like terrifying and malevolent local wildlife. One drunk teenager dressed as a dead Power Ranger stumbled across a zebra crossing. 'I hope he gets home safe.' I thought, like the concerned adult that I am. I think my dressing up and getting drunk days may be over.

Our neighbours really went to town with Halloween decorations this year. Traditionally I think Halloween is much more of an American celebration. I seem to remember reading a while ago that Halloween actually has Christian and Celtic roots, but the commercialisation of the holiday is definitely an American trend. When I was a child in the UK, very few people decorated their houses or went trick or treating. But recently us Brits have been embracing the spooky festive traditions and the supermarkets are full of candy to give to local children dressed as ghouls knocking on doors. We drove passed several houses and flats that were decorated in the most elaborate and creepy manner. One house even had a huge spider the size of a large double window on the side of the building. In the dark with the fog, the decorations looked even more real. Both Mr C and I did a double take as we passed by the huge black arachnid decoration. After we got home and scurried past a row of fake skulls hanging across our neighbors' doorway, we made ourselves cups of chamomile tea and settled down to warm up in bed. Unfortunately I was distracted from my warm and comfortable duvet by the local urban fox.

We have a local fox. In fact it is probably more than one, since the fox I saw tonight looks larger than the one I saw a few months ago. Our living room window looks directly out on to the street outside and over a small area of shrubs and bushes that is fenced off. It is land that belongs to the council but is extremely overgrown and no one goes in it or does anything with it. The local cats often go in there, mooch about and sometimes fight over it. In recent years I been observing the local foxes travel through it in the direction of the bins outside our apartment block. They love to investigate our rubbish, tear open our bin bags and drag our garbage all down the street and across the pavements. As annoying as this is, I still cannot get over the thrill of seeing such a beautiful and large wild animal so up close. The foxes never look up at our window, so they never see me starring at them and because this little patch of wilderness is blocked off from the street, people are always walking by in the dark and not looking over the hedge. They have no idea that less than a metre away a massive fox is just behind a fence starring out at them with dark glittering eyes in the shrouded shadows. The only times I have ever seen any humans behind this fence, was when a local council employee came to dump some rubbish in a big wheelie bin and then also when a few years ago, one sunny afternoon, a teenage boy took a teenage girl behind the bins to kiss her repeatedly.

Watching the foxes at night is magical. You rarely ever see a fox in London during the day. I have seen foxes in daylight only twice in 28 years and then it was from a long distance away (one fox was trotting beside some train tracks and the other time, I was in a car in traffic and the fox appeared in the upstairs window of an abandoned building beside the road). Urban foxes seem so large, but they move so lightly and quickly. They make very little sound as they trot through the streets. They don't seem to frightened of us, just a little wary. The bigger ones have thick coats and long bushy tails. The younger ones look lean and hungry and skittish. They live in the same city as us, all around us, but they are like pale orange ghosts that we only glimpse at briefly during the night. My lovely local fox felt like more like the real spirit of Halloween than a hundred Draculas or skeletons.