Halloween

Here are pictures of some of the "trick or treat" callers tonight.
The commercial machine moves ruthlessly on though. Yesterday the supermarket was clearing out its Halloween merchandise and replacing it with Christmas decorations and cards.

Halloween preparations.

Halloween (the 31st October) is the night when witches are supposed to ride and hold their covens. This is because the next day is the Christian Feast of All Saints Day when the saints visit the earth and witches are banished.  Actually Halloween derives from the pre-christian festival of Samhain celebrated by bonfires and feasting when the cattle and pigs which could not be fed over the winter were slaughtered and the meat either roasted and eaten  or preserved as sausages and hams for the winter.
When I was young in the 1960s Halloween was a minor celebration for children. You may have a small party, make lamps out of turnips and tell ghost strories. As it coinicided with the apple season you may also play games bobbing for apples floating in buckets of water which you had to eat holding your hands behind you.
Halloween was always much bigger in America. After the success of the "Halloween" franchise of horror films in the 1970s and 80s shops started promoting it here and now it is a big commercial event.
American style Halloween features not apples but pumpkins which are made into lanterns. It also involves "Trick or Treating" where children go house to house challenging for a trick or treat. A trick should invole pulling a rude face but naughty children choose to egg your car or windows or pull up garden plants so in fact everyone gives a treat, usually some form of chocolate or sweet so the children collect bags full of goodies to eat. The children often dress up as witches or ghouls so they enjoy the whole process. Increasingly the shops use Halloween as an excuse to sell more and more; manufactured costumes and specially decorated cakes and sweets to say nothing of pumpkins which you could not buy at all 50 years ago.
When I went to the supermarket last week they had 3 aisles dedicated to Halloween merchandise mostly fancy dress.
The Teenagers and young adults have got in on the act and there are lots of costumes for them too which they wear either to parties at their homes or, more often, to themed events at nightclubs. Most of these actually took place last weekend although "trick or treating" is confined to the actual night.

Autumn/Fall

The word for this time of year is one of those few words that varies between British English which calls it "autumn" and American English which calls it "fall".
We have been abroad at this time the last few years but coming home to the peak of the season we were really appreciative of the colours and changes. European and northern american trees are largely deciduous. This means that they lose  all their leaves in the winter. This helps them withstand the winter gales, and, as they hold less snow, less likely to break and lose a bough under the weight of snow in the winter. The first step of losing the leaf is that it stops photosynthesising and loses the green coloured chlorophyll. This means that other pigments show through and trees at this time of year show a wonderful range of yellow and orange colours and some acers a deep crimson.
The effect is very lovely and the New England area of North-East America is famous for its colours and they are a major tourist attraction, so the americans call the season "Fall" for the falling leaves.
Here are some pictures taken both near my mothers house and in the grounds of Lyme Park a former home of the nobility now in public ownership.

Our House

This is our house. It was built in 1972 so it is just 40 years old. Like all houses in Britain it has a pitched roof so that rain and snow run off and external gutters to collect the rainwater down drainpipes to the grid into the sewers. The roads have grids in the gutters too.
Inside the groundfloor has a living room, dining room, cloakroom, Kitchen and a small room we use as a single bed room for guests. Upstairs there is a bathroom, and three bedrooms which can take a double bed but we use one as a study. We are a small family, just the two of us now, and our one daughter when she was younger. When she was at school and we both were working we used the house as having two bedrooms and three studies and ate at the table in the kitchen.
The builder who built the house bought a farmer's field and built roads and a number of houses  on it. Such a development is called an estate. There are several roads but only one in and out. All the houses look similar.
The concern in our houses is to keep them warm. The walls are made of a double skin of bricks with a gap betweem filled with foam insulation. There is fibreglass insulation in the loft. The windows have double-glazed units of two sheets of glass with a vacuum between to keep the heat in.
The heating is by central heating, a boiler heating water which is pumped to radiators in each room. We use gas to heat the boiler and have a gas fire in the living room as well. The gas is not in bottles but comes in pipes which are laid under the road.

Bank Holidays

Public Holidays in Britain are generally called "Bank Holidays" as the Bank of England closed on these days. In England and Wales there are 8.
Four relate to the two christian festivals of Christmas and Easter. Christmas Day, (celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ) on the 25th December is a holiday as is the 26th of December called "Boxing Day" as it was traditionally the day that servants got a holiday and present from their employer. If Christmas or Boxing Day fall on a Saturday or Sunday the Monday/ (and Tuesday) after are holidays.
 The Friday before Easter Sunday is a holiday. It is called "Good Friday" as it is supposed to be the day that Jesus Christ was crucified. The Monday after Easter Sunday, is also a holiday called Easter Monday. 
Easter is not a fixed holiday and different christians had different ways of calculating it but all Roman Catholic and Protestant churches now calculate it as the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox, so it can vary from late March to mid-April. 
Otherwise Bank Holidays are generally not on a particular date but a particular Monday so that there is a long weekend.
The complete list of holidays is
!st January
Good Friday
Easter Monday
The first monday in May (Mayday)
The last Monday in May  (Spring Bank Holiday)
The last Monday in August (Summer Bank Holiday)
25th December (Christmas Day)
26th December  (Boxong Day)

Except for Xmas day when everything shuts down , like the morning of Eid el Ahda, schools and factories are shut but shops and tourist attractions are open. For the spring and summer holidays particular events such as music festivals and  country shows are organised for those days to attract visitors from the cities to spend money. As everyone want Bank Holidays to be sunny to enjoy these events or go to the seaside, and as it rains a lot in Britain the joke is always that if it is a Bank Holiday it will rain.

Workers must get 20 days paid holidays a year and the 8 Bank Holiday days can count towards them although most people get them as well. Depending on the employer you may be able to  choose when to take your 20days or the whole factory may shut down at a particular time. Lots of firms close for the 3 days between Christmas and New Year. (All schools and most offices and factories have Saturday and Sunday off work each week).

Flags and Anthems

Britain has its the national flag, the Union Jack.

The national Anthem is "God Save the Queen" which you can hear if you click on this link
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fro3J4n5_Sc

The Welsh flag is the Red Dragon

The Welsh national anthem is "Land of my Fathers".  Here is the link
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpu7PEyvdCU

If you can't understand the words it is because  they are in welsh.

The Scottish flag is called the Saltaire

Their flag used to be the Red Lion and their anthem "Scotland the Brave". This link leads to it played on bagpipes and drums

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSH0eRKq1lE&feature=related

In the 1960s this was used as an advertisment for a porridge breakfast cereal. At about the same time a group of folk musicians wrote a song about a 14C battle when the scots beat an invading english army and now they always use that

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7YhtLXry60

The english flag is the Cross of St George

The english cheat. They use "God Save the Queen" as their national anthem as if they rule over the other countries. There is pressure on them to adopt "Jerusalem" as their national Anthem

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bW1XV-2OPkI

Around Britain

Britain (excluding Ireland) consists of 3 countries; England, Wales and Scotland. We live in Wales which is to the west. Scotland is to the north.
The northern half of Scotland has its own language, scots Gaelic. Wales has its own language too, Welsh or Cymraig. Everybody speaks english as well. The welsh and scots are celts. They are descendants of the people who originally lived in the islands before the romans invaded. In that way they are like the Berber people who are descended from the people who lived in Morocco before the Romans and the Arabs invaded.
The map shows the boundaries between the countries by dark lines. We live in northeast wales near the border. The two nearest large towns are Wrexham which is in Wales and Chester which is in England. We are about in the middle.

Hello

We are Steve and Maggi. We are 60 years old and no longer work. We have a house in Taroudant and live there for 5-6months a year in the winter. The house we have lived in for over 25 years is in Wales in the UK. We live there for 6-7 months a year, mostly in the summer. Mr Razguini  has asked us to write a blog to tell you about life in Britain.