Come On In, The Pumpkin’s Only Peachy.

Halloween, and there were no egg missiles.

No fireworks. No trick-or-treating teenagers with personalities so dire, their Scream masks made them considerably more attractive. No bonfires. No dogs trying to swallow their own tails as bangers bang overhead. No burnt-out shopping trolleys. No scalded cats. No highjacked paddywagons. No beer bottle shards wedged between your young Frankenstein’s toes.

Jesus, I LOVE being middle-class!

Well, fair enough, I accept that my middleclassisity is as much a disguise as the teenagers’ Scream masks or Mary Harney’s ministerial post; I’m keeping my head down out here in the SUV-suburbs, hoping no one will catch me unawares in my jammie bottoms, skinning up in a puddle of someone else’s piss. I don’t want to be chased out of here by a torch-wielding mob – it’s ever so nice amongst the pampas grass and unattended bicycles – so I tend to keep the Roaring Mammy act to a muted minimum, and only listen to trance behind in-ear headphones. My dogs are kept collared, my grass is kept hidden cut. Being middle class is wonderful; I don’t know why I was so snobbish about it before.

Granted, there’s less of a sense of community here in the anonymous land of four-bed semis, but given that my old Council estate community was made up of bad-mouthing biddies and drunken “absent” fathers who cared only for absence when the Social came a’sniffin’, a sense of community is something I can sacrifice for the comfort of knowing my car will not be smouldering every Sunday morning. I don’t miss my back garden being a public throughway, nor do I miss the fisticuffs thrown every weekend night on the unfinished green in the middle of the estate. Abandoned, unlicensed cars, feral babies, tenacious travelling salesmen … they’re in the past now, and as likely to stay there as I am likely to be alive at the end of this sentence.

Yup, still here.

Funny thing is, with the national pride taken in having no pride at all, people keep encouraging me to march back into Council estate life.

“Think of what it would mean to you financially!” I am told. “Think of the Irish gratification in going back to basics, the joy of having not a pot to piss into, if you bother to piss straight at all.”

Oh, fuck that. It’s just marvellous paying through the nose for a pot to piss in. I don’t care that I’m being hobbled by private sector rent. It’s all for being able to keep gateposts, and saplings, and not having to put electric fence around your wooden fence. I live in a world now where teenage boys go to school and teenage girls babysit other people’s kids, and no one drinks WKD, and the postman isn’t fortified. This is fucking great, everyone! FUCK tucking your chin in and shouldering through assembly in the School of Hard Knocks. There’s no pride in cultivating an almighty chip on a wizened shoulder, or in being all tough and hard and shouty!

Not that you’d know I felt this way, if you were to meet me At Home, where I would make up some guff about having been dragged-up. I’d be as bolshy as any smartarsed, common maggot with a library card. It would be entirely secret that I don’t sneer at soccer mums and their kitchen islands and built-in espresso machines and the fact that they’ve never been to Supermacs.

Oh, I don’t partake in this polite nonsense, not on any active level. I observe. No PTA meetings for me, thank you, no Neighbourhood Watch coffee mornings, or car-pooling, or Wednesday afternoon spinning class. It’s a selfish outlook, I suppose. Castigation due, and accounted for.

But it’s such a comfy world you’ve created for me, Middle Classes! Paying an extra ten grand a year just to enjoy a Halloween that isn’t at all scary is well worth it.

Do you know, there are seven dogs between ourselves and both of our next door neighbours, and I don’t know what five of them look like?

Delightful.