So, Halloween.

I grew up with serious estate envy when this time of year rolled around. Living in the middle of nowhere doesn’t leave a whole hell of a lot of trick or treating options that don’t involve your parents having to drive you two miles up the road to the nearest “friendly” house so you can get a handful of “fun sized” Snickers bars. Kids that lived on estates made out like bloody bandits partly due to volume and partly due to fear. More houses, more candy, but more KIDS, the more likelihood of getting your house covered in eggs and toilet paper, so you’d better not be stingy or be ready to sit in the bushes all night with a garden house to deter potential vandals.

On my very last trick or treating ever, I got to finally experience the joy of Halloween on an estate. I went with some of my friends around a sprawling development in Frederick County and literally filled a whole pillowcase full of swag in between trying to scare the living hell out of each other. It was the haul of the century. Best. Halloween. Ever. (Incidentally, the Worst.Halloween.Ever was when I spent the evening in an All Saints Day service with my at-the-time Catholic boyfriend. Talk about leeching the fun out of a holiday.)

This year, I will not be dressing up, as pregnant French Maids or Devil Women are neither sexy nor clever. I am, however, going to play Bingo at one of England’s huge professional Mecca Bingo establishments after some extreme coaxing by two other girls. (That, and The Rock Star is playing poker tonight, so it’s either Bingo or siting at home on my ass by myself and watching a scary movie which will inevitably lead to many hours of sleeplessness, because I am a huge dork that takes the possibility of Freddy Kruger much more seriously than muggers and rapists.)

All fond memories of Halloweens past and present aside, what I would like to stress on this the spookiest of days is that those of you with pets to practice some restraint. When I was a kid, one of my favourite picture books was Animals Should Definitely NOT Wear Clothing which illustrated the sheer stupidity of trying to dress our fellow living creatures. For some reason, Halloween brings out the sadist in many pet owners and they feel compelled to propagate horrors like this:

And this.

And this. (Can you just see the burning shame on the face of the dog on the far right? “Merciful God, what have I ever done to deserve this?” he seems to be saying. “Was it what happened with the carpet? Cause that was TOTALLY an accident.” But honestly, it’s really the one who’s going, “Whee! I’m a banana!” who really makes the picture.)

I am loathe to admit that I actually find this practice humourous, but as you can see, there’s very little funnier than four dogs dressed up as bananas. But for the love of all that is holy, let us try leave the earth’s creatures as nature intended, despite the inherant hilariousness in dressing them up. Let us respect their wild heritage and remember that they all descended from monsters that would as soon feast on your intestines as look at you. Very few would naturally be found in Frankenstein or hot dog costumes. Give them their dignity. (They found out recently that elephants demonstrate self-awareness. So you wouldn’t put a silly hat on one of THEM would you?)

Leave the trick or treating to us bipeds. Happy Halloween.

It seems to me that for a load of clever people, scientists can be pretty thick.

Today, the BBC ran an article detailing a new study done researching the effects of mobile phone use on male fertility. Researchers have discovered that men who “heavily” use their mobile phones had few sperm and those that they DID have moved less well and were of poor quality.

Some of the detractors of this study were quoted in the article saying, “If you are holding it up to your head to speak a lot, it makes no sense that it is having a direct effect on your testes.”

RIGHT.

Where do women keep mobile phones? IN THEIR HANDBAGS. Where do MEN keep their mobile phones? IN THEIR FRONT POCKETS, RIGHT NEXT TO THING 1 AND THING 2. IS IT REALLY ALL THAT SURPRISING THAT THE SWIMMERS ARE SUFFERING?

I don’t think that the majority of us need a PhD or a white lab coat to come to this ball busting conclusion.

Britain’s dominant religious institution, the Church of England has proved little match in the present to growing ranks of atheists, agnostics and secular humanists. Having spent my first Sunday EVER in church since coming to Britain, I have to admit that it’s not much of a challenge to see why.

The Rock Star and I attending the christening of our goddaughter yesterday. To be completely fair to the C of E, the church this took place in was actually Methodist, but the soporific effect was much the same. I don’t know about anyone else, but my feeling about religious worship is that it should inspire and empower, making even those in the congregation who are visiting or new feel grateful to be there and warmly welcomed, even if they don’t share in the faith of the worshipers.

We were greeting by a sour-faced old lady who glared at us.

“Are you god parents?” she croaked.

“Yes.”

Two green pieces of paper with prayers and responses were thrust into our hands.

“Make sure to return these at the end of the service. We re-use them.”

“Erm, thanks.”

My guess is that the congregation in question wasn’t wild about christenings; a Sunday when their sanctuary is invaded by a large number of non-members (a large amount of them non-religious) who are there solely to participate in a tradition that a great percentage of them aren’t entirely sure why they’re perpetuating in the first place, only they know that when you have babies, you have them christened.*

It wasn’t until the service was well underway that we became aware that we were sitting in an actual hour long church service rather than just a christening. The clue was when the profusely camp vicar excused a rather large group of children in the corner and launched into his homily. (My choice NOT to empty my bladder prior to the beginning of the service came into sharp focus when the Prawn, perhaps already old enough to have a sense of irony, began kicking me in it mercilessly.)

But neither the utterly uninspiring and unoriginal sermon (most likely entitled “Why Can’t We All Just Get Along?”) or the truly dreary readings by very self-righteous old women (Corinthians and Ephesians. Lord have mercy) were as depressing to me as the hymns.

One of the requirements of graduation from my college was attendance at chapel. (I was so bad at this, I ended up having to take a class to make up the credit. Luckily, this class was so un-structured, I ended up choosing to write a 20 page essay in defence of pornography. No chapel AND I got to look at porn. Bonus!) However, despite a great deal of events in chapel being fairly thinly attended, the ones that we guaranteed to draw a crowd were hymn sings. Boy, howdy, do Mennonites ever love to sing. And they’re GOOD at it. Four part harmony, raising the roof stuff. The hymnal was stuffed with a combination of good old favourites, newish bits and some ethnic tunes that had recently come into circulation. Despite my waning faith, going to hymn sings always made me happy.

The hymnal we were faced with yesterday not only was lacking actual MUSICAL NOTATION of any sort (if you don’t know the damn song, how are you supposed to sing it without the MUSIC?) but in any kind of quality sacred music WHATSOEVER. All 5 dreary pieces that were chosen were 18th century, non-musical drone-a-thons, one of which had the most awful, dirt licking, grovely lyrics in the vein of:

“You’re so fantabulous/we’re completely rubbish/I’m afraid of my life/so please won’t You hide me until I die?” (I can just imagine God listening to that going, “Oh for fuck’s sake. Grow up.”)

Being at last granted blessed release from the joyless service, it lead me to wonder why those that choose to attend weekly find there to nurture them. Kevin Smith makes a great point about faith in Dogma. One of the characters, a woman working in a Planned Parenthood clinic tells her colleague:

“I dated this guy once. He told me that faith is like a glass of water. When you’re young, the glass is full, and it’s easy to fill up. But the older you get, the bigger the glass gets, and the same amount of water doesn’t fill the glass anymore. Periodically, the glass has to be refilled.”

It was difficult for me to see how anyone could fill their personal glass from so dry a stream.

*Having grown up between traditions, (Anabaptists, who don’t believe in baptism until the person is ready to make a commitment to the church and Methodist, who baptise at birth) I ended up getting baptised round about age 13 after going through a confirmation class which, looking back now, imparted some very troubling views about God, sex and money.

I was very fussy about which university I attended. In fact, I was so fussy, there was only one place I wanted to go and when I was accepted, I felt a great swell of completely unfounded pride because honestly…they took just about everyone. Don’t get me wrong, the campus was populated by vastly intelligent and creative people, many of whom were in a league of their own in the arts, science and literature, but as far as academic entry standards went, I discovered the seemy underbelly of the admissions process when I was forced to take Speech 101 as part of my excessively useful Communications degree. In my class were several members of the baseball team who, after two weeks of listening to some of the worst public speaking imaginable, were referred to as “I sleep with my bat.” They were just biding time till they could get back out on the diamond and slap each other on the asses again, I guess.

My college is a liberal arts institution, so everyone has to do a little bit of everything, including things that you might not necessarily understand or be interested in. Taking Latin American History from 1750 to the Present, for example is a small price to pay for being able to do fun stuff like photography and jewelry making. (Actually, no, that class was fairly expensive in terms of time, effort and mental anguish.) Professors were fairly hip to the fact that not everyone in their class was going to be going out of their minds over the subject and when asking questions on exams, were extremely lenient when it came to answers. (I had at least TWO professors who would award partial or full credit if you made them laugh. I swear to god that’s how I passed Christian Ethics. And maybe Physics.)

For the academic elite here in the UK, there is nothing that they like better than a good question. Earlier this week, The Rock Star stumbled onto a site with real live interview questions asked to potential students at both Oxford and Cambridge. Some are obviously intended to gauge the reaction to the question rather than searching for an actual answer. (The “What is a tree?” variety) Others are obviously a measure of the student’s knowledge and suitability toward a certain field of study. (The “Please solve the following…” variety) The Rock Star and I have had a good old natter about some of these. Included below are some of the better ones.

Q: If there were 3 beautiful, naked women standing in front of you, which one would you pick? Does this have any relevance to economics? Philosophy, Politics and Economics, Oxford.

A: I should be very surprised if any economist in the history of time has ever, in real life, had to contemplate this conundrum.

Q: Why can’t you light a candle on a spaceship? Physics, Oxford

A: This question is a lot harder to quantify than it sounds. Just about everyone we’ve asked has come up with different reasons why you couldn’t, couldn’t for very long or probably SHOULDN’T engage in space pyromania.

On the “definitely can’t be done side”, it’s believed that without convection (heat can’t rise if every way is up!) the candle would certainly just snuff itself out.

In the “could be done but shouldn’t” camp, it’s believed that the rich oxygen that circulates in spaceships would probably create a fireball the moment a match was struck. Although after some fairly nasty astronaut barbecues at the beginning of the space program, the oxygen mixture isn’t quite as rich as it used to be.

Those that believe that you “could, but not for long” think that since there would be no gravity, wax would have nowhere to drip and snuff the flame shortly after it was lit.

My father actually knows someone who did research on this very subject aboard Nasa’s “Vomit Comet”, but unfortunately, does not remember what the results were. Being a science teacher, I feel that he should have anticipated that I was going to ask him this question one day and should have been paying better attention.

Q: Explain Naomi Campbell’s life. Law (Jurisprudence) Oxford

A: HOW DARE YOU ASK ME THAT, YOU PEASANT?! DO YOU HAVE A MOBILE PHONE I COULD BORROW??

Q: If you had to send 3 things in package to a group of isolate tribespeople that would immediately let them know what it means to be French, what would you choose? Modern and Medieval Languages, Cambridge

A: The Rock Star immediately went, “Duh, I could do that in ONE thing. A book, translated into their language, all about France.” This is why he would get into Cambridge and I wouldn’t.

The page itself is definitely worth a look and good for hours of conversation!

I’ve been doing more contemplating on boy parts and girl parts recently than probably ever before in my life, even including when I was in high school and discovering that there are all kinds of interesting and clever things that they can do.

Yeah, yeah, 10 fingers, 10 toes, everyone says that, but the REAL question is, “Who the heck is in there anyway and WHAT KIND OF PARTS DO THEY HAVE? Doo Dah or Hoo Ha? Willy or Winkie? Colt or Filly? Hamburger or Hot Dog? TEEEELLLLLLL MEEEEEEE!”

You often try to imagine your future son or daughter and the extraordinary amount of knowledge that you feel obligated to impart upon them before they move into a flat with 3 friends and you KNOW that they throw all the pizza boxes and condom wrappers in the closet before you come to visit.

A son needs to know how to balance traditional ideas of masculinity with healthy emotional practices. He needs to know how to solve things without his fists. He needs to be brave enough to stand up for his beliefs and not to take too seriously what everyone else says- to be his own man. And he needs to learn to keep his boy parts to himself (or at the very least well protected with as few girlparts as he can manage) until he himself is ready to be staring at a sonogram monitor at tiny developing boyparts that he himself had a hand in creating.

A daughter needs to know how to be a strong woman- to do whatever she chooses to even if it’s not traditionally “feminine”. She needs to know how to recognize poisonous people and how to deal with them politely, but firmly. She needs to be able to defend herself. And she needs to keep her girl parts safely hidden away (or at least interfacing with as few well protected boyparts as possible) until she herself is willing to have a tiny person with girlparts of her own sitting on top of her bladder in an uncomfortable fashion.

Of course, both sons and daughters need to embrace creativity, curiosity, empathy and a willingness to see the world in shades of grey rather than in black and white.

So today at our 20 week scan, the nature of the Prawn’s parts was naturally the question of the hour.

Unfortunately, the Prawn had other ideas.

The tech spent a good 10 minutes chasing my offspring around my belly, trying to get decent shots of all of the things that needed checking, poking and prodding along the way, trying to get the Prawn into more suitable positions. The Prawn was having none of it.

When it came to crunch time, the little bugger not only had it’s legs clamped tightly together with the cord running in between them, but also had one hand firmly ensconced over the vicinity as well. Not even born and already contrary.

The technician commented that if she had to make an educated guess….she’d say it was a girl due to visible absence of obvious boy parts, but then again, said boyparts might be lurking beneath the Prawn’s anti-paparazzi capabilities and might suddenly make an appearance in 11 weeks for the next scan, so we’re sure not buying anything gender specific just yet.

The best news we got, however, is that the Prawn looks entirely normal, so that is, of course, a relief!

Me and the Rock Star, we don’t screw around when it comes to house buying.

This afternoon, our offer on a flat in the village that we live in currently was accepted. We’d always bemoaned the fact that we’d love to stay in the village, but would never in a million years be able to afford it. But call it Providence, call it Fate, call it whatever, 2 days after losing the maisonette, we found the Forge Flats.

HOW MUCH NICER IS THIS PLACE THAN THE ONE WE WERE ABOUT TO MOVE INTO? (There’s really no earthly way that you could know, but trust me when I say IT IS.)

The view from the living room and kitchen: An orchard, hills, a church and a windmill.

The view from the master bedroom: OUR GARDEN. Yes, we get our very own personal garden for our very own personal use. With trees. And grass. WITH A FLAT.

The kitchen and bathroom are both larger than the ones in the maisonette. Everything is FINISHED and finished well (currently inhabited by a builder and his wife and he did all of the improvements), so no stupid having to put floors down before we can properly move in. Walking into the place felt like…home. We were instantly besotted.

Color us pleased.

My favourite cynic, Ambrose Bierce, defined litigation as “A process that you go into as a pig and come out of as a sasauge.” If I may apply this for a moment to the world of real estate.

The Scene: Saturday morning. The family home. The Rock Star and Mrs. Potamus have mail. The mail is from our solicitors. There are very few occasions on which you wish to hear from your solicitors. If you have inherited a million pounds, for instance. But not when they have something unpleasant to tell you.

The Rock Star and I are fair old newbies at the world of house buying. However, our solicitors are NOT. In fact, we could kiss them on their 400-pound-an-hour-charging faces for doing their job properly.

What our solicitors have discovered is that the leasehold on the property that we were about to purchase was only for a period of 68 years. This is information that we were not given by the estate agent or the seller (who told us it was 90) nor the rather expensive homebuyer report and land registry survey that we commissioned. (which told us it was 79) We were unaware of the implications of a relatively short lease span until our lovely lawyers informed us that it was very unlikely we’d be able to SELL the house if we bought it, as most mortgage companies will not grant mortgages for places with a 65 year lease or less.

Needless to say we were slightly stricken by this turn of events and wanted desperately to know what we could do to salvage it. Our first, and most telling call was to our estate agent.

We’ve been tremendously happy with the service that we’ve received from them up until yesterday morning. They were friendly (we WERE about to give them a shitload of money, so that goes without saying) and they spent a lot of time working with our solicitors on our behalf, trying to push the sale through. However, when the Rock Star, who is by far the most mild mannered guy on the planet called to explain the problem to our advocate there, he was absolutely blown away with the extreme hostility, defensive behavior and rudeness that he was confronted with. (The Rock Star ALWAYS makes phone calls like that. I would have ended up trying to reach through the receiver to remove this guy’s liver. The Rock Star didn’t even come close to raising his voice.) The slimy little bastard swore up and down and sideways that he’d made us aware of the leasehold situation up front while the Rock Star tried to get him to explain what was going on and how much it would cost us to extend the lease.

“For your property? 8 to 10 grand,” he said, without a moment’s hesitation.

Suddenly, every small reservation we’d had about the place came flooding back. Little snippets of information we’d dismissed were made sense of and we realized that we were about to become victims of a trap that quite a few other people before us had managed to avoid. Tomorrow morning, we’re instructing our solicitors to discontinue the sale. We were two weeks away from moving in.

This takes us back to an area bordering on Square One. However, in the last week, we’ve found some extra monthly incomings and can now look for a BETTER property. We even have two viewings arranged for tomorrow afternoon.

Coming up: further homebuying adventures of two grateful sausages.

I’m pretty excited that the seasons have finally decided to get their act together.

“What? Huh? Oh right,” said summer earlier this week, “time for my holidays.”

Autumn is by far one of my favourite seasons. A lot of people feel a deep sense of renewal when Spring rolls around, but I’ve always felt it a good deal more keenly when the leaves begin to turn. I suppose, as a child, it was all to do with school- discovering who and what was going to shape your life over the next year and getting blank books full of clean white paper and unsharpened pencils. (Nothing more tempting or full of promise than a blank notebook!) In high school it was all about football games and beginning a new sports season. As I got older, it meant life returning to the Goshen campus, stunning leaves and frosty evenings sitting under blankets down by the millrace with friends and laughing until we were sick.

I suppose the remnants of these experiences stay with me even today and clear, bright cold days fill me with anticipation of something great to come. This year, Autumn will see us moving into a new house.

Today, we transferred the good part of the largest lump sum of money that either of us has ever possessed into the hands of lawyers who, in theory, will use it to pay the deposit on the maisonette and bring us within weeks of finally being able to get INTO our new place. The seller seems quite keen to get the sale agreed as well and equally as eager to try to get as much cash off of us as possible. We weren’t entirely surprised that he decided to charge us for the cooker that currently inhabits the flat, but we were rather more surprised that he asked as much as 100 pounds for it. (We told him £50- take it or leave it.) I suppose one can’t blame a guy for trying, but I can’t help shaking the feeling that if we’d said, “No thanks”, that he probably wouldn’t have been bothered enough to drag the damn thing down the stairs anyhow.

Things are moving forward.