This year we’re hearing about some genuinely scary stuff at Halloween, even though no-deal has been postponed for a few months at least, so we probably won’t have more than the usual seasonal shortage of medical supplies.
The scariest thing, apparently, is the volume of plastic waste generated by leftover plastic witches hats or whatever.
This seems like a second order issue – surely the basic problem is the shops being filled up about six months in advance with random seasonal crap, which many of us probably don’t need and maybe don’t even want. Even worse, people are then persuaded to actually buy it, which encourages the whole thing to keep going in a vicious circle of overconsumption.
Fortunately this scenario not scary any more, because we’ve had many decades to adapt to it – otherwise we might all be too anxious to buy anything and the whole system could collapse.
And you better watch out… because even as this lot is being frantically discounted to within an inch of its life, another avalanche of superfluous delights is coming to town. If there is no snow left anywhere by the time you read this, there should be some pictures of it on the internet, so you can see what an avalanche was..
Anyway, the second scariest thing is the amount of leftover pumpkin which gets thrown away after people have inexpertly carved some sort of ugly face into the rind. This is less scary because the leftover pumpkin can be eaten, e.g as a key ingredient of the imaginatively named pumpkin pie. Whereas eating enough leftover plastic to make an impact on the problem might not be such a good idea. Microplastic residue in the food chain may not have been proven 100% to be harmful but it doesn’t sound very wholesome, even from a non-expert perspective – this is probably not the extra fibre we need in our diet.
And a quick glance at the news suggests that there may be such a thing as the boogeyman, no matter what Jamie Lee Curtis may have told us in 1978.
