Hallowali

It’s a festival of lights in one culture (but no fireworks this year) and an excess of pumpkins, ghosts, skeletons, witches and bats in another. Here’s next-door’s creepy display.
October was the second coldest October on record and has less rain and sun than average.
A2 is rereading Bryant & May: Strange Tide by Christopher Fowler and A1 is rereading Fowler’s Bryant & May: The Victoria Vanishes in an annoying American edition. If there’s one thing I can never imagine Arthur Bryant saying, it’s “cell phone” — but oddly, this is the only thing that’s been Americanised: there are still sweets, not candy, pavements rather than sidewalks, colours not colors and so on. Which made the ubiquitous changing of “mobile” or “phone” even more noticeable. And irritating. These books are quintessentially English — more specifically, Londonish (if there’s such a word), and Americanising them is just wrong. I don’t want US-written books to be Anglicised, so why do the opposite? US readers aren’t idiots.