Big Red

"So, you want to build a gingerbread cottage on the Nature Trail?"

"Yes. Just a temporary one. It's for my exciting new interactive Halloween event I have planned. I want to tell the children the story of Hansel and Gretel and have them actually discover this amazing house made of sweets and lollipops as we walk the trail. I want to inspire awe and wonder."

"I've got a shed, some off-cuts of wood and a bit of leftover paint."

"That'll do."

                                       *   *   *

A few days later saw myself, McColleague and Lovely Warden bringing these mundane entities together to create magic.

"Well, I don't know about you, but I think it looks amazing."

"Compared to the old Nursery Rhyme Trail a couple of garden gnomes and a plastic windmill would look amazing."

"True. But once we're in costume and the group are in the right frame of mind, I am quite sure this simple garden shed with painted bits of wood stuck to it will be utterly convincing as a magical gingerbread cottage in the woods. Don't look at me like that. It'll be fine."

The day of the event was a perfect October day, sunny and crisp. I planned to take three guided walks over the course of the afternoon, each one telling the tale of Hansel and Gretel.  I wanted it to be as interactive as possible, so the children were actually part of the story. So many guided walks and tours are hugely dull for adults, let alone children, and I wanted this to be anything but.

I was the story teller and guide, Big Red. I used to be Little Red Riding Hood, I informed the groups, but I grew. I had personal experience of these woods but not to worry, the big bad wolf wouldn't be bothering us today (at which point I showed them the wolf's head prop I had cunningly stashed in my wicker picnic basket.)

The picnic basket also contained a big bag of breadcrumbs which the children were encouraged to dip into so we could leave a trail just as Hansel and Gretel did and which would be obligingly eaten by ducks, sheep and, on at least one tour, a visitor's dog.

 McColleague was a part of each group, coming with us from the start, nonchalantly carrying a large shoulder bag. As we drew nearer the gingerbread shed I paused for a while in the orchard, to recreate Hansel and Gretel's fearful night in the woods. "Close your eyes," I instructed, "and listen. What sorts of noises can you hear? What sorts of noises do you think you might hear in the night?" Some of the children were entertainingly creative with their hoots, growls and comedy parps.

While all this was going on McColleague would leave the group and hurry on ahead to the shed, where she would complete an amazing transformation using only the contents of the big shoulder bag.




After sufficient time had passed I would move the group on to the next chapter of our story. Hansel and Gretel, tired and hungry, finally stumble across  a dwelling in a clearing. Hooray, they are saved! It looks like a shed, but no, it's a totally edible and completely realistic gingerbread house!

The children would eagerly gather round as I recounted the delight with which Hansel and Gretel broke off pieces of chocolate and biscuit and  gorged themselves silly. But what they didn't know was that in this house lived.....a witch!

And bang on cue McColleague would come flying out of the shed and chase the children, cackling madly. The kids never failed to shriek and run while their parents collapsed in laughter.

Eventually things would settle down again and we would finish the story, with Hansel being slowly fattened up and the short-sighted witch being fooled into thinking he was still too skinny to eat when he hands her a bone instead of his finger to squeeze through the bars of his cage. We re-enacted this with a small plastic dog bone from the pet shop as I didn't want to risk upsetting anybody with a real one.

The tale finally ended with clever Gretel tricking the witch and pushing her into her own oven. I did the pushing for this bit. Interaction is all well and good but knowing how keen over-stimulated children would be to shove a wicked witch headfirst into a painted fireplace I thought it best to cover this part of the roleplay myself so that McColleague and her pointy hat would survive to perform another day.

By 5 o'clock we were all interactived out.

"There aren't any more tours now, are there? Please tell me that was the last one. Please don't put me back in the shed."

"That was the last one, McColleague. All that remains now is to close up, cash up, put more lippy on, open the wine and partay."

I am a great believer in balancing hard work with an equally demanding level of play. Some people might say that having been on their feet all afternoon, talking non stop, having to do it all again tomorrow, they might prefer to have a quiet evening in on the sofa, resting. Those people are sensible and have probably never known the pain of having to open a visitor attraction the morning after with a head full of ball bearings. However, these people do not get to go to my after-event parties, so who's the real winner here? Answers in the comments, as per.

Big Red

The Return of the Doris (Again)

I am returned, with so much to update upon it is a little overwhelming. In the meantime, while I get my hilarious stories in order, I shall give you a brief, visual summary of the intervening months.

November
It is a sad day for me, after Halloween, when our amazing creature creations have to be taken down and put back into storage. I was immensely proud that several visiting families told us that ours was the best Halloween trail in the region. I can believe it. No crappy paper ghost flapping forlornly in the corner for us! We do Halloween properly. Full-sized monsters and spooky sound effects abound. Still, all good things must come to an end and, reluctantly, I put away the rubber spiders and turned my mind to other issues, such as the water leaking into the house every time it rains.

It isn't a new problem. I have been flagging it up for quite a while now. Still, at long last, shortly before Christmas, some buildings department people and an architect came to see the problem for themselves. Of course, as is the nature of such things, it wasn't raining. It was a glorious winter day with not a cloud in the sky. We would have to recreate rainy day conditions if they were to try to pinpoint where the problem lay. No problem.

"Up you go," we said to Lovely Warden, issuing him with a ladder and a hosepipe. "Try not to fall off, but if you do, try to roll with it."Afterwards, while I was mopping up the subsequent indoor water features that resulted from this experiment, the architect came to show me the water ingress points he had marked on his drawing.

"So, that's pretty much all of it."

"Yes."

"The entire front of the house."

"Yes."

"Almost every timber and every panel needs attention."

"Yes."

"And when can we start work on this?"

"March."

"When we re-open?"

"Yes."

I have been on a course. I know that this is not a disaster. It is a challenge to be met.

December

Time to prepare for the annual Christmas event, which entails much joyous gathering of foliage.

Lovely Warden McColleague and I duly donned our foliage gathering hats and wellies, climbed into the Gator and set off up the road, singing festively.

"Why's it making that noise?" asked McColleague as the Gator thwup-thwup-thwupped its way along.

It turned out that a knackered tyre was making that noise and Lovely Warden had to remove the entire wheel and take it into town to be repaired.

Undaunted we set off on foot to gather whatever we could carry back to the house. We wanted an enormous ball of mistletoe to hang as our centrepiece in the Great Hall. In one of the many old orchards on the estate we found just the specimen.

"Up you go," we said to Lovely Warden, issuing him with a saw and a pair of loppers. "Try not to fall off, but if you do, try to roll with it."


It was an impressive size once Lovely Warden cut it free. Almost as big as McColleague. We used double the rope we would normally to hoist it aloft in the Hall and even then I had a nagging concern it might plummet onto an unsuspecting visitor and flatten them, festively.


It was an exciting walk back across country with the fruits of our labours. Lovely Warden has a habit of taking shortcurts which involve fording streams and scrambling up near vertical slopes of mud. It all got a bit Blair Witch Project for a while. Which I liked, being a Halloween queen.

The Hall was duly decorated and set for a medieval feast. Sadly the public can't sample the food, but the re-enactors are happy to feed it to me. They have lots of interesting spiced alcoholic beverages to pass around in wassail bowls too, which makes for an entertaining evening.


January

Ah, back to work after the Christmas break. The moat froze solid and the flagstones in the Hall developed an alarming mould. I phoned the curatorial department for advice on the best way to tackle it and was informed to brush the mould carefully before vacuuming it up via a special filter and to wear face masks of the correct specification, to avoid breathing in spores.

Ten minutes later Lovely Warden appeared with a broom, McColleague fetched the Dyson and we all pulled our jumpers up over our noses for safety. It was fine.

February

So far this week I have missed the Spring Conference, a training day and a staff meeting due to the heavy snow. While I am obviously deeply disappointed I am making the best of it. Luckily McColleague and I only just re-ordered toilet rolls and biscuits last week so I think I may survive until the thaw.

Fright Night Delight

Those of you have been with me a while know of my love of Halloween and the amazing skill that goes into taking our event budget of £0.00 and turning it into a fabulously scary production.

We still have last year's monsters ready to go back into position, but we have some new props too. I have been busy making a jolly clown for the children. Everybody loves clowns, right?

Halloween Happenings

Here you see McColleague hard at work, making final adjustments to our Grim Reaper mannequin. We had decided he was a tad over-stuffed for someone skeletal, so she is removing some bubble wrap. It was a pose that begged to be recorded for posterity.

Our hanging creations are complete, and now in place in the trees. They have proved hugely popular with visiting children, and I have spotted many having their picture taken with our various creatures. We call this one Spike.
This is Swampy.
This is Grunt.
This is Yvonne.
And this is the Bad Bishop.

I have since received a comment card. It reads:

"My husband and I enjoyed the tea room and the house but we felt that as practising Christians the witches and corpses depicting Halloween weren't quite what we were expecting!"

I have many thoughts on this point of view, but the one I shall leave you with is that it's still a lot less scary than the Nursery Rhyme Walk.

Bonus Features!

Yes, much like those fascinating bonus features on DVDs, giving you insights into the special effects and creative processes involved in a major film production, I am delighted to give you a peek behind the scenes in our Halloween Creature Workshop!

It's hard to credit, I know, but our extensive props are not bought in at great expense from professional events companies.

No, believe it or not, we make our creatures ourselves!

Behold, a monster in the making! It looks, at first glance, to be a couple of rubber eyeballs nailed to a piece of wood. OK, while it is a couple of rubber eyeballs nailed to a piece of wood, once we add a mask and a bit of a body it will be transformed into an amazing creature of the night, to delight and terrify!
See? Here's one I prepared earlier. Isn't that incredible? Personally, I find there is no better way of assessing how effective your finished creature will be than to dress it up in a bit of muslin and put it on a sit and ride lawnmower in the courtyard.

Thriller

It's that time of year again. The time when I become very excited about Halloween and spend a lot of time making or buying new props. I find it hard to resist showing off my new acquisitions in the scariest ways I can imagine. This means I spend a lot of time waiting in shadowy corners so I can leap out for encounters like this:

"WooOOOOOoooooooOOOOOOOOooooo!"

"Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh!"

"Bwahahahahahahahahahahaaaaa!"

"You utter, utter cow. I almost had a heart attack."

"Sorry, Mildred. Ooh, is that Derek coming up the path? Don't tell him I'm behind the door!

WooOOOOOoooooooOOOOOOOOooooo!"

And so on.

Halloween

Creating the monsters was the most fun.

The challenge is much the same regardless of the occasion. How to create a marvellous, entertaining, top quality event with absolutely no budget whatsoever? The answer is to acquire things.

We have acquired so much Halloween equipment over the years it now fills more boxes than the Christmas decorations.

This year we acquired three surplus-to-requirement scarecrows. And the bottom half of a mannequin. From these humble materials we crafted the finest props known to the heritage sector. The Grim Reaper, a Mad Monk, a Wicked Witch and…. the bottom half of a mannequin.

While we were assembling the various body parts in a disused outbuilding, McColleague and I found ourselves continually interrupted by random passers-by. The door would swing open and a head would emerge, peering in curiosity at the cobwebby gloom of our impromptu laboratory.

“Hello!” I would chirp. “Can I help you?”

“Oh, no, no….just having a look round.”

“Ah, right. I’m afraid this part isn’t open to the public. It's a bit dirty and cluttered.”

“Oh, right”.

“So, if you'd like to close the door, we'll just get on with our work.”

“OK.”

A pause.

“So, what was this old building then?”

“A milking parlour. But it’s not open to the public.”

“Right. And what are you up to then?”

Sigh. Eventually we would persuade them to go without resorting to bludgeoning them over the head with the bottom half of the mannequin and dragging them out.

“Well,” I said to McColleague, “it’s just as well we’re not performing diabolical experiments on corpses in here. It’s a lot harder to have a secret laboratory than it looks in films.”

Which led me to a fond memory of Halloween Past, in Another Place with my best friend, when we were busy decorating the basements. Part of our design included an enormous Pentagram on the tiled floor. Rather than risk damaging it with scratchy chalk, or similar, we decided masking tape would do the job. Many, many attempts later, surrounded by screwed up balls of masking tape, we finally managed to produce something that looked almost right.

“They get a bad press, but hats off to the Satanists,” said my friend. “It’s much harder than it looks!”

It was a good point and one well made. If I were trying to summon Beelzebub I doubt I would have the patience to spend much more than half an hour or so trying to get my Pentagram to join up. And that's before you take into account the candles and blood and robes and all the other accoutrements.

Anyway, this year's props looked magnificent. Even the spooky marrows (we didn't acquire enough pumpkins) were a winner. I suppose I need to start acquiring firewood for bonfire night now. I need more cats in trees!

The Final Countdown

Well, we’re into the last week of the open season!

There is a bit of a party atmosphere among the staff and volunteers. We’ve cracked open the chocolate biscuits in the office.

For me, the party atmosphere is enhanced by the planning and preparation involved for the actual party this weekend. We have Halloween Half Term activities for families every day this week, but on the Saturday evening we have an extra special, tickets-only party. It’s very popular, and we tend to have booked all the available spaces within days of the tickets going on sale.

Halloween is a time of pure creativity. We have fun making the props and decorating the house and grounds, while the children have fun dressing up and pouring scorn on our efforts to scare them. When you have a generation of children brought up on blood-spattered shoot-em-ups on whichever games console they happen to have, it's really hard to startle them, or even induce mild unease, with a rubber spider and a bed sheet. It's a challenge I keep taking on, though.

As part of the party package we do include “refreshments”. "Refreshments" is a great term, as I feel it doesn’t really imply proper food. In this instance we have bought in a quality selection of the finest Halloween-themed treats our local shops can offer. "Flourescent" is the word that springs to mind.

I took a phone call earlier. It was a very nice lady wishing to know more about the Halloween Party and to book some tickets.

“So, what kind of food is it?”

“Oh, well, mainly party food. You know. Nibbles. You may want to feed them a vitamin or two before you come”.

“Ah, only one of my boys does have a food additive intolerance.”

My eyes slid helplessly to the gaudy pile of orange and green sugar-based confectionaries on my desk.

“You might want to keep him away from the Creepy Cakes then”.

She booked her tickets regardless. I feel I should go out and buy some carrot sticks, just to show willing.