Róisín Ingle: Halloween is not what it used to be and that’s no harm
At a friend’s birthday party recently, I got talking to a man about my broken dishwasher. Party chat can take you to all sorts of unexpected places. I can’t remember why I mentioned the dishwasher in the first place. I must have been desperate. I get bored easily and usually try to elevate Small Talk to Big Talk as soon as possible but sometimes “my dishwasher is broken”, which might be described as Middle of the Road Talk, works too. It turned out to be an unexpectedly rich seam on this occasion. The dishwasher had broken that morning. After preparing a post-sleepover brunch of bacon, eggs, sausages and beans, I asked four teenagers to unload and then load it again, and somewhere in the course of this activity a part fell off the dishwasher and the top shelf got stuck. The dishwasher wouldn’t close and the prospect of washing dishes…