Róisín Ingle: Halloween is not what it used to be and that’s no harm

At a friend’s birthday party recently, I got talking to a man about my broken dishwasher. Party chat can take you to all sorts of unexpected places. I can’t remember why I mentioned the dishwasher in the first place. I must have been desperate. I get bored easily and usually try to elevate Small Talk to Big Talk as soon as possible but sometimes “my dishwasher is broken”, which might be described as Middle of the Road Talk, works too. It turned out to be an unexpectedly rich seam on this occasion.

The dishwasher had broken that morning. After preparing a post-sleepover brunch of bacon, eggs, sausages and beans, I asked four teenagers to unload and then load it again, and somewhere in the course of this activity a part fell off the dishwasher and the top shelf got stuck. The dishwasher wouldn’t close and the prospect of washing dishes by hand as in days of yore loomed scarily in front of us. I know it’s spooky season but a broken dishwasher, now that’s a real horror story.

The man at the party said the exact same thing had happened to him recently. “The top shelf?” I checked. “Yes a white part fell off. But,” he said triumphantly. “I took a photograph of it, uploaded it and the AI told me how to fix my dishwasher.” Increasingly these days, I find myself thinking ‘I am living in the future and it is mental.’ But that might be just me.

At the same party I got talking to people of all ages about Halloween costumes. There was the octogenarian who said that when she was a little girl growing up in Longford and Monaghan in the 1950s there was no dressing up, only basins of water for apple dunking and maybe a slice of barmbrack if you were lucky.

There was an effervescent woman in her early 70s who remembered dressing up as a Muslim woman in 1975. Cultural appropriation was not a thing back then. She thought she was only marvellous rocking a full burka and face covering at a party. “But nobody asked me to dance all night,” she said still, decades later, sounding slightly surprised by this turn of events. Then there was the teenager who showed me a photo of her skin-tight yellow Uma Thurman Kill Bill costume. I’d have killed Bill and several others to have ever had the nerve to wear a thing like that.

When I got home that night I decided to get the AI to fix my dishwasher. I took photos and uploaded them and chatted to a robot while my daughters laughed at me. We’ve been having a lot of chats about Halloween costumes. Their approach to dressing up for Halloween is using clothes they already have or borrow from friends to create fancy dress gear. Going as a cat? Wear a little black dress, throw on a pair of cat ears and paint on whiskers with eyeliner. Going as a Tin Woman? A silver minidress with a few bangles and a silver party hat will do the job.

Halloween is not what it used to be and that’s no harm. For years I was either a witch or a ghost and, once, a rabbit. The witch costume involved a home-made cardboard pointy hat and black plastic bags, the ghost was a sheet with holes for the eyes. The haul after you’d been around the houses was mostly apples or monkey nuts. The big houses sometimes threw in a Curly Wurly or a Chomp or a packet of Chipsticks. Good times.

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Regarding the “costumes”, my teenagers tell me I just don’t get it. And they are right. I don’t. But I am trying. A much cooler friend tells me a lot of Halloween dressing up is ironically “sexy”. A friend’s daughter, for example, is going as a Sexy Pumpkin. It will probably involve a corset and fishnets, as is the way with all Sexy Veg. Her son is going as Indiana Jones and she is going as Indiana Jones’s Mam. “Indiana Jones’s Sexy Mam?” I asked. She claims not, but then sent me a video of her practising with an impressive looking bull whip in her back garden so I’m not sure.

Another friend’s daughter is going as a Sexy Boxer. I’ve heard of someone going as a Sexy Remote Control. Sexy Broken Dishwasher might even cut it these days. It’s ironic. It’s the future. Anything goes.

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The AI was very nice about the broken dishwasher. The AI is always nice; it’s that creepy friend who always tells you exactly what you want to hear. But in the end the AI could not help me fix my dishwasher. There was a lot of back and forth about the model and make, the details of which had long washed away. So I texted my very handy brother-in-law instead. He came around before 9am the next morning and spent approximately 90 seconds at the dishwasher before declaring it fixed. Modern technology cannot hold a candle to an old-school brother-in-law who has a way with appliances. The future is mental but it’s here and we’ve got to deal with it. So beat the AI and get a trade, kids. Now that’s sexy.

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