JERRY TAYLOR
Trick or Treat?
Did you all enjoy summer? If your answer is yes, then I’m guessing you don’t live in Scotland.
Now, I know we all like to moan about the lack of good weather in this country, but this year was grim. We saw more rain in the summer than we had all winter. All sorts of rain – heavy, drizzly, sideways. At one point it even started raining coins, but apparently that was just climate change.
I hope the weather didn’t dampen the moods too much, though. If we are good at one thing in this country, it’s making the best of what we have. I saw a lot of people filling their time by taking up new indoor hobbies this summer. I took up playing chess with a friend to ease the boredom at times. At one point when we were playing, my friend said, ‘Let’s make this more interesting’. So, we stopped playing chess. I then decided to register for a blindfolded shooting range. If you’ve never tried blindfolded shooting, I highly recommend it. You don’t know what you’re missing.
And just like that, autumn is upon us. We’ve not even had the chance to pump up our paddleboards and now we are gearing up for carving pumpkins. I’m ok with that, though, because Halloween is my favourite time of the year. I love everything about it. The pageantry, the excitement, and the scare factor, but most of all, the terrible jokes. For those who didn’t know, Halloween is a very important date for my career as a writer. Why? Because every joke I hear from a kid, I steal and put it in my pantomimes or Tik Tok. Great material and all for the price of some Wham bars and Haribos!
It’s great to hear a new joke, especially after having to listen to the same poem thirty times in one night. You all know the one – Trick or treat, smell my feet, give me something good to eat.
Here are my top five Halloween jokes told by kids last year:
- What do you call an alligator in a vest? An investigator.
- Why did the ghost go to the bar? To get sheet faced.
- I ate a ghost once. It went right through me.
- Did you hear about the glamour model ghost? She had big boo-bies.
- What do you call a spider with twenty eyes? A spiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiider.
One thing I also love about the scary season, is seeing all the effort put in to making costumes. Some of the efforts you see online are almost film quality. But then again, some of the simple costumes are just as effective. One year I went to a Halloween party with a first-class stamp on my head. When people asked what I had came as, I just replied, ‘First Class Male’.
Long gone are the days when your mammy would wrap you in a black bin bag, gel your hair in a side parting, draw fangs on with an eye-liner and call you a vampire. It’s a whole new ball game these days and I’m here for every bit of it. And who knows, the way things have been going, we might even have a heatwave this Halloween.
In this edition, I’d like to leave you with this thought… is cereal soup?
Until next time, Ayrshire!
