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| Copyright REBELLION |
It's a wet and windy Autumn day outside, as the rain runs down my window and leaves swirl past as if they need to be somewhere in a hurry. I almost feel like I should be preparing to brave the elements whilst getting ready for school, so evocative is it of days of long ago when such weather was something to be enjoyed (if you were ten years old) rather than cower from like a big feartie.
I can smell that 'woody' tang in the air, with hints of fireworks and Hallowe'en, and find myself wondering why, when I was younger, All Hallow's Eve and Guy Fawkes' Night seemed separated by a period of several weeks instead of the actual five days that exist between them. I can remember, in school, as the night of October 31st approached, the afternoon being given over to making masks for the big event to come. Then it would all happen again for November 5th, and I defy anyone to cast their minds back without seeming to 'remember' these two celebrations as being separated by a far longer period of time than they actually were.
I've often wondered how such a thing can be so. If October 31st fell on a Monday, mask-making day would have been on Friday the 28th. That means Guy Fawkes Night would have been on the following Saturday, and mask-making day would have occurred on Friday the 4th - a whole week later with a Saturday and Sunday in between. Well, weekends obviously seemed far longer to us as kids back then than they do now, but not all mask-making afternoons were partitioned by a full weekend, so the seemingly elongated interval between the two events is not fully accounted for by such an explanation.
We'll just have to put it down to that same mysterious phenomenon which makes all our yesterdays, in retrospect, seem better, brighter and longer than they really were. Don't we all feel that the summers of our childhoods were gloriously sunny for months on end, and that every Christmas morn we woke to find a deep carpet of snow spread before us beyond our bedroom windows?
I doubt I'm alone in preferring to recall some things as they seemed to be, as opposed to how they actually were. ("I think, therefore it was" - as someone surely must have said.)
I can smell that 'woody' tang in the air, with hints of fireworks and Hallowe'en, and find myself wondering why, when I was younger, All Hallow's Eve and Guy Fawkes' Night seemed separated by a period of several weeks instead of the actual five days that exist between them. I can remember, in school, as the night of October 31st approached, the afternoon being given over to making masks for the big event to come. Then it would all happen again for November 5th, and I defy anyone to cast their minds back without seeming to 'remember' these two celebrations as being separated by a far longer period of time than they actually were.
I've often wondered how such a thing can be so. If October 31st fell on a Monday, mask-making day would have been on Friday the 28th. That means Guy Fawkes Night would have been on the following Saturday, and mask-making day would have occurred on Friday the 4th - a whole week later with a Saturday and Sunday in between. Well, weekends obviously seemed far longer to us as kids back then than they do now, but not all mask-making afternoons were partitioned by a full weekend, so the seemingly elongated interval between the two events is not fully accounted for by such an explanation.
We'll just have to put it down to that same mysterious phenomenon which makes all our yesterdays, in retrospect, seem better, brighter and longer than they really were. Don't we all feel that the summers of our childhoods were gloriously sunny for months on end, and that every Christmas morn we woke to find a deep carpet of snow spread before us beyond our bedroom windows?
I doubt I'm alone in preferring to recall some things as they seemed to be, as opposed to how they actually were. ("I think, therefore it was" - as someone surely must have said.)
