COLM TOBIN: Nostalgic for those monkey nuts, plastic facemasks and fake teeth

HALLOWEEN is a proper family favourite in our house.

Ever since I was a kid, bobbing apples at home or trick‘r treating around the mean streets of Ardfield, it has always been a really special and atmospheric time of year.

Of course, the tradition in Ireland goes way back. It was the time of year when the ‘doorways’ to the Otherworld opened, allowing the dead to come into our world which these days tend to include copious Freddy Krueger claws and Scream masks.

For us, living in Marino which was the first housing estate built in the Republic, we have a very special connection to this time of year, living just a short walk from Bram Stoker’s birthplace in 15 Marino Crescent. There is a special festival held in the Dracula author’s honour here every year.

And the whole area really goes all-in for Halloween.

At the moment, freshly-carved pumpkins bedeck front porches and all sorts of pound-shop horrors hang out of people’s gardens, whether it be fake spider webs adorning trees or mock graves popping up out of driveways. If aliens visited, we’d have a lot of explaining to do. Although, it’d be the perfect time of year for them to blend in.

Halloween is daft, dark, weird, playful and oodles of fun and I Iove to see it coming around. And it helps that basically I’m a complete child myself.

Of course, it’s also mid-term break for those of us with school-going kids, which inevitably means a trip home to West Cork for us, a journey I cherish even more at this time of year when cosy, warmly-lit little shops and their fogged-up windows remind me of many happy Halloweens growing up in Clon.

Back then things were simpler – there were monkey nuts, fake teeth and plastic masks held to your head with those cheap, vicious elastic bands – their razor-sharp extremities would create great welts in your face that could last until Christmas. Halloween is falling on a nice day this year, Tuesday, meaning we can enjoy spooky fun on the night in Dublin and travel down Wesht for the weekend for more frights and thrills. The best of both Otherworlds.

The Leap Scarecrow Festival has become a family favourite for us and we have barely missed a year in recent times. Personally, I’m interested in seeing Ireland’s Mythical Goddess Exhibition in Leap which features ‘photographs of local ladies bringing Irish mythology to life followed by the mesmerising sound of the West Cork Gamelan Orchestra’. Yowsa.

For those of you looking for some additional spooky entertainment in the run-in, I recommend the brilliant BBC Sounds podcast ‘Uncanny’ which investigates real-life tales of ghosts, spirits and poltergeists and has some genuinely horrifying moments. It’s just made a successful transition to BBC 2 television, too, which is worth your time.

Paddy caught in own web

IT’S all a welcome distraction from the seemingly unending rotation of real-life horror on the news these past weeks.

Whether it be details of horrendous murders in the courts in Ireland, or the cataclysm enveloping the Middle East, it feels overwhelmingly grim at times. Indeed, it appears that we are entering a whole new phase of information warfare, which makes taking in current affairs and social media even more exhausting and all-consuming.

This week you had the attempted cancellation of the Web Summit, on the back of controversial comments made by co-founder and now ex-ceo Paddy Cosgrave regarding the Israel-Palestine conflict. I wouldn’t be the man’s biggest fan and have found his brand of contrarianism tiresome over the years, but his position on Israel and Palestine is hardly controversial, and broadly in line with that of the Irish government.

In a very worrying development, there seems to be a ‘you’re either with us or against us’ attitude held by many on the Israeli side and any suggestion or any allowance for the rights of Palestinians is branded as anti-Semitic.

This was summed up in a now-deleted post on X, formerly Twitter, by an Israeli diplomat based in Dublin suggesting Ireland is funding Hamas. The Israeli deputy chief of mission in Ireland Adi Ophir Maoz wrote: ‘#Ireland wondering who funded those tunnels of terror? A short investigation direction – 1. Find a mirror 2. Direct it to yourself 3. Voilà.’

Hardly fair, measured or true now, is it?

No vroom for thrifty folk

HOUSEHUNTERS struggling to get on the property ladder would have been glued to social media this week, as an anecdote by Gordon Ramsey did the rounds.

It really showcased cartoonish levels of privilege masquerading as some tough-love life advice. The story revolves around Ramsey begging his father-in-law for a deposit to buy a flat only to be advised to sell his 911 Porsche instead.

Ramsey told the HighPerformance podcast it was ‘the best advice he ever gave me’.

And there you were feeling guilty for spending a tenner on smashed avocado on toast ... Sell the Porsche, lads!