Halloween

A few weeks ago Mr Doxie got sweet talked around by the little horrors darlings who live locally to agreeing that they could come and knock on our door at Halloween. I never encourage this personally ( I look upon it as begging ) but Mr Doxie is a bit of an old softie and in this case he knew the kiddies and in their defence,they did ask so I guess we can let him off this once for saying yes... Of course this meant that we had to go out especially one night to buy in supplies of tooth rotting delicious candy to dish out to them on Halloween night.

Now somehow I had been dragged into this as I was told that apparently if you are going to do it at all, you have to do it properly!...cue lots of frantic sewing to make up suitable bags ( complete with appliqued bats on of course! )to put the candy in.

Cue the day in question...We had a very pleasant day on 31st October visiting a local abbey. I had not been out with the camera for some time, so thought wandering around the abbey grounds looking for something with the theme of Halloween would be a good way to get back into the swing of it.

It is hard to think of Halloween and not think of scary or morbid but hopefully my pictures fit the bill okay. I came across a pet cemetery...it was quite moving to think that people so many years ago were just as "animal nuts" as us today, well you'd have to be, to have little tombstones made up especially...somehow I think they wouldn't have been using a power tool to make these up...so much love/labour would have been involved, if not expense.BTW there were much older graves than this, but it was rather difficult to read the names.

...for the day of the dead I give you Grip, Mike and Barney's final resting places...I'm sure they were much loved pets for someone to have gone to all the trouble of making them a beautiful place to rest in. Unfortunately I forgot my monopod ( groan ) so the pics of the little building that was built in their honor are not as clear as I would like, other wise I would have posted them too. I have a shakey hand these days, must be all the gin!








I took this silhouette of the tree and the building with the idea of placing a rook on the end of the branch but alas it has been a busy 24 hours since and I have not had time to do this...perhaps by next halloween I will have got around to it...I have the pic of the rook in question that I took a few months ago with this kind of project in mind, but hey ho other things take priority don't they?

I also found some interesting lamps...I thought I'd try my hand at creating two looks, menancing and friendly...Below is the lamp as was pretty much, just normal digital dark room processing, no fancy stuff...It is not very atmospheric really isn't it? You will have seen my attempts at my little experiment at the top of the post...I focused ( excuse the pun ) on the top of the lamps...I am not so sure now whether the first shot really is friendly, but it sure as heck isn't as grim or menancing as the other two. I don't know if you see what I see what I see in it.

Anyway, on with the story of Halloween...We rushed back, which meant that Sharp End sacrificed his walk at the local wildlife reserve to make sure we got back in time for the little darlings that would be calling ( don't worry Sharp End had a good sniff and mung around in some woods near the Abbey earlier in the day )...and yes you guessed the delightful little cherubs didn't turn up! I am now stuck with a bag full of sugary empty calories that I would never go near in a million years...and I am talking a BIG bag...oh well, at least I had some banal televison to placate me in the form of the X Factor...that with a prawn curry and a bottle of red meant I had almost forgiven them by the time I went to bed...anyone want some candy?

Doxie