Happy Halloween!

I hadn't realised it before, but Halloween is big business in the Middle East, which is strange given that it is a mix of Celtic practices, Catholic and Roman religious rituals with a few European folk traditions thrown in. Yet the Bahrainis love it.

Our compound takes Halloween very seriously. The owners, a wealthy Bahraini family, even go so far as to deck out an entire section of their home as a haunted house. The "Ghost Gazette" was delivered to the door last week, with instructions for Halloween proceedings and for the first time ever, I felt obliged to invest in some cobwebs and spiders, costumes for the girls and bucketfuls of sweets and lollies. And our black cat, Enid, was an authentic live accessory on the night.

The shop where I went to purchase these Halloween goodies was packed with Bahrainis clutching everything from flashing ghoul lights to vampire fangs. They were queuing out of the door and two women in abayas were having a heated exchange about who had seen a witch's hat first.

At just before six this evening, the first Trick or Treaters arrived and it was a steady stream for the next couple of hours - at least 150 people, I reckon, including quite a lot of dodgy looking teenagers (why are they still interested?) and a fair few domestic staff clearly after the free choccies like everybody else.

Isabelle dressed as a dwarf and Olivia was a witch. She managed to chip her front tooth over the weekend, so could also sport a crooked smile. The tooth now has an infection and she may need an expensive dental procedure. The false teeth I bought her for her costume would have been a far cheaper witch's grin.

Happy Halloween! What did you get up to?

Where's the envelope?

On Monday I went to the local post office to send off a copy of a report to the UK. Handing over my brown A4 size envelope to the clerk I waited while he weighed the letter twice and then waited while he spent ages tearing stamps out of various books and assembling them in a pile on the counter. He ended by handing over what looked like postcards of the Royal family.

"These are the world's largest stamp" he told me proudly. I'm not sure if this is true, but the stamp was of gargantuan proportions. And I needed three of them.

I stared at the pile. Then I began sticking and when I'd finished, the envelope looked like this:

Nine stamps in all. Admittedly not as many as Manoj Kumar Mondal, who managed to use 3809 Indian postal stamps in March to break the world record for the maximum number of stamps on a parcel, but not bad for someone who wasn't really trying.