PLAYING WITH MATCHES

It's the end of October and of course, Halloween is in the air. This is where I get my most controversial I think, being less than a fan of the season.

It's occurred to me that approaches to Halloween vary, depending on how real you believe it all is. The overwhelming attitude of my colleagues, and by extrapolation, most people (I imagine), is that it's all just a bit of fun - rather like a ghost train at the funfair. It exists in a world of cardboard cutouts lit by torches, draped with plastic cobwebs: a world where nothing is really real but we'll all go along with pretending it is, and making it fun.

Then along come all the killjoys. They believe that behind those cutouts, lurking like a silhouette, is a very real kind of evil, waiting to devour our children. The ghost train, they warn, has real ghosts on the track. And if we all realised, we'd boycott the ride for good.

Work adds another interesting dimension. They've always enjoyed celebrating Halloween - I've written before about the ludicrous way the execs once dressed up to present a company meeting in ghoulish fancy-dress. Meeting rooms used to be turned into spidery grottoes and there were desk-decorating and pumpkin-carving competitions. This year it's all online with the 'spooky coffee breaks' already stencilled into the company calendar. All for fun, I assumed, though it does seem like rather a lot of effort for a thing that's essentially supposed to be for children.

As I say, I'm not a fan. I consider it playing with matches, only doing so in a world where you believe fire is a made-up concept.

And that brings me right back to this idea of reality and perception and how it affects our interaction with the world. It's why truth matters and the notion of 'fake news' is so dangerous - if only personal truth matters, if we're only to believe what we believe is true for ourselves, as so often is implied by our society, then logically, truth can't exist at all: we're all just floating round the universe in bubbles of our own reality, believing our personal ideas about whether ghosts and ghouls and God and gender and blackness and whiteness really exist.

And if you think that sounds dangerous, it's because it is. You can't pretend the ghost train is fun once you know where the track leads.