Fright Night

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It's Halloween, so I should write about something scary. Death, monsters, mad scientists playing the organ in their castle basements - that sort of thing.

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Last weekend I was talking to someone who said western cultures are all in denial about death, and we need to teach people as children to confront their own mortality.

I told her the Tibetans confront death by publicly feeding their corpses to vultures. I'm not at all sure that's true, but it's what I've been told. She was horrified and quickly changed the subject. I think she had in mind something like when parents sit their children down and tell them about "the facts of life" - but for "the facts of death".

I never had the sex-ed talk from my parents - they say they thought I'd get it all from watching David Attenborough documentaries. Actually I eventually got it from reading Desmond Morris books, before they were taken away for fear they'd corrupt my fifteen year old mind.

I'd been groping with other boys for two years by then. At the single-sex school they'd sent me to, to give me a better education than a state school could provide. The school was a shambles and a sham - I received no education and learned nothing there. Except that I liked "having fun" with the other boys, which produced vintage gothic screams of terror from my parents when they found out.

All if which is probably a bit scary.

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At the STW conference, a speaker said he wasn't convinced the occupation of the middle east was really about oil. He said the neocons were all following an ideology where it made sense to bomb Iranian nuclear power stations and create multiple Chernobyls, just to make sure the middle east couldn't build nuclear weapons to use on America,

I don't think he was right - I think the point of attacking the middle east is to control it's resources and extend industry there, not to make these things impossible by making the area uninhabitable. But even so, it's a scary idea.

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I've never seen a dead body.

I've been to a few anodyne funerals (without vultures), seen endless sanitised-and-glorified killings on lousy cop shows, seen hundreds of people dead and dying for real on the TV news, watched a few dozen horror movies...but I've never see a real live corpse.

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In politics, the electoral left in the UK is just poised to dissolve into an orgy of splits, recriminations, allegations, defeatism and bitterness. Not that most of the country will notice.

Meanwhile the electoral right has "apologised" for allowing a grand total of 1.1M immigrants into the country, promising to make the UK more racially pure.

I don't know about you, but I find that just a little bit scary.

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