Happy Hallowe'en!

If this is the season when ghosts take the air

what carnival spirits must they all appear
From graves deep in harlequin leaves they arise
to be greeted by bonfires and Catherine-wheel skies
In the candle-cast shadow they await eagerly
those tales told for equal parts terror and glee

Hurray for Hallowe'en! Here is a recipe for my own witchy concoction. It looks vaguely like frog-spawn, and tastes like magic:

Green Stinger Cocktail
(makes two)

Non-alcoholic:
2 kiwis, peeled (no New Zealand jokes please)
juice of half a lime
2 parts ginger beer
3 parts orange juice

Pour ingredients into a blender, blend on high for several minutes till completely smooth.

Alcoholic:

2 kiwis, peeled
juice of half a lime
gin (depending on where you are on the alco-meter)
dilutable ginger cordial* (about 3 shot glasses)
orange juice (about a glass)
Blend till smooth

*I use Rock's Ginger cordial. This comes in a beautiful bottle and I also sometimes include it in hampers for friends. Here's a piccy of it. You can usually find it in health food shops, including Nourish if you're in Dublin.

A gorgeous thing I found online is this timeline of spooky words, courtesy of Oxford Dictionaries.

If you are preparing for an evening of story-telling by the fire, you can brush up on your Edgar Allen Poe and your Algernon Blackwood on this page of online ghost-stories.

BBC4Extra have their yearly cornucopia of deathless prose, including a series of MR James tales which starts today.

October is for knitting!

True devotees will tell you that any season is knitting season, but October has an inviting little nip in the air that especially recommends woolly pastimes. If you are planning on giving knitted gifts for Christmas, you're probably already waving needles about and counting stitches. Knitty.com is filled with browsable treats like these pumpkins:

and some really strange things, including a knitted umbrella!

You can combine knitting with your love of hens (for who amongst us doesn't love hens?) by knitting jumpers for the featherless urchins of Little Hen Rescue.

For those of you whose idea of a wild night is knitting while listening to radio plays or audiobooks, I can tell you that Dublin libraries has a copy of Paul Magrs 'Never the Bride' on cd, which is seasonably Halloweenish.

Here is a blog all about knitting, and it includes details of the charity Knit-a-thon which has been going on since September.

Why all this talk of knitting? Well like many people, I was forced to knit a doll's dress in primary school. It never got finished. For years I could still see it sometimes, taunting me. But earlier this year I shelved my resentment and bought some needles. I already had wool. I don't know why.
Anyway I knitted myself a really cool pair of woolly sleeves. These were necessary because shops (bear with me on this one, it's a bit like particle physics) shops sell woolly dresses, with short sleeves. Now. If it's warm, you won't want to wear a woolly dress, will you? And if it's cold, you'll need long sleeves. But yet, there they are. And yes, I bought one of these dresses. I think I imagined a kind of not-warm-not-cold day, dry and kind of autumnal, when it would be perfectly comfortable to wear it. Of course Ireland has a weather system which is conscious, and which plots against us. So that perfect day was never going to happen. Anyway I've knitted the sleeves now, and in doing so I have exorcised the ghost of that unfinished doll's dress, and discovered a love of knitting. Everyone I know is getting a scarf for Christmas.