Hallowe'en

After a nice late breakfast, I drove up to the Travellers' Rest pub on Caerphilly Mountain to meet a couple and prepare a funeral service with them for Monday. As they live in the Valleys it was the most convenient thing to do apart from meet at the funeral parlour, something I am reluctant to do, preferring to meet on neutral ground, and not at our house now I'm retired. Unfortunately the pub hadn't yet opened, so we had to sit outside at a picnic table. Fortunately the rain stayed away until our business was completed.

Then, Clare, Rhiannon and I went to Penarth and had a fish and chip picnic lunch on the beach. It was such a grey day. With the tide right out, some of the photos I took were almost devoid of colour apart from shades of grey, and converting them to monochrome for comparison, it was fascinating to see the differences.

Later in the day, Rhiannon went out with her little friend Anwen on a 'trick or treat' expedition, and returned with a bag of various kinds of junk sweets that parents are no longer keen for the children to eat. We had only a couple of little visitors, and they got little boxes of Smarties. Just as bad really. Rhiannon doesn't much care for sweets, apart from chocolate, and is good about keeping stocks and rationing herself. Admirable restraint for an eleven year old. It's amazing how she's grown since the summer, and the start of her first year in secondary school.

Another penetrating Arne Dahl episode on BBC Four this evening, all about teenage sex trafficking and child pornography, with a little web hacking thrown in. All very current issues, and interesting to see how they are represented from a Swedish perspective. Much more haunting than all the fantasy horror we're exposed to at this time of year, as it's that much closer suburban ordinariness.