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The scariest Halloween of all time, where the treats could be laced with death and the tricks were being played by something invisible to the human eye.
The kids were still looking forward to this day even more than they would to Christmas and we were going to leave a box of packeted sweets out by the door for any children foolish enough to risk Trick or Treating. I made a sign saying “Help Yourself†which had two meanings this year. I decided to laminate it as it had been raining.
I put it in the laminator and once it was making its slow crawl through the machine I went to pack up some of the Christmas EQ books I am sending out to the charitable (join them
http://rhlstp.co.uk/scope).
I almost forgot about it, but when I came back to the machine the laminated sheet was nowhere to be seen. I looked down the back of the shelves it was on, moved boxes, even went downstairs to see if it might have somehow wafted to the staircase and then out of sight. I looked into the machine as well, but that was just crazy- the laminator is maybe 10cm wide. There wasn’t room for a laminated piece of A4 in there and I couldn’t see anything anyway.
I was starting to think I must have gone insane (because I am not already), but having checked everywhere five times and used reason I came to the conclusion that having discounted all possible scenarios, the only one that made sense was that the sheet have never left the laminator. I looked again and could see something in there, but was it the sheet? And how?
It wasn’t reachable though so I wondered if the answer was to put another sheet through.
That was not the answer, it turned out. But at least this one only got stuck halfway.
In the end I managed to tease the first piece out with a screwdriver (disconnected from the mains first). It had concertinaed up into a nice fan. I blame my son, who when asked to draw on the sign had used his pen to make a big hole in the paper and then scrunched it up a bit. But really I could only blame myself, for not guiding the piece through. I pulled out the second piece by hand, but it look some effort.
This is not the Halloween any of us wanted.
But we did have a fun afternoon as we headed to Phoebe’s school where they had set up a Halloween trail where you had to find pumpkins and painted stones and then make an anagram from the collected letters. One of the other dads commented that this must be pretty easy compared to Taskmaster (so essentially informed me that he’d seen part of my arse- then again, who hasn’t?) but it wasn’t. I thought the anagram was going to be October 31 as the early letters were Tcobo but then an i turned up.
Can you solve the anagram tcoboirmsk?
One word. It’s spooky.
We saw a zombie emerging from someone’s doormat and a skeleton coming out of a bin and the village had gone to some effort to make this plague ridden Halloween fun. No one took any sweets from our doorstep though. Perhaps they couldn’t read the concertinaed sign.
