Stop moaning, Britain. You have only yourself to blame for Halloween.

Americans are everyone’s favourite scapegoat. Lay blanket blame any other group for pretty much anything and you’re likely to get hauled up on charges of racism, sexism or snobbery. Americans, however, are fair game. From the toxicity of the current political environment to the rise of obesity to the dumbing down of popular culture, it is ALL the fault of the USA. I am yet to witness an American physically forcing a European to use Facebook, eat at McDonalds or watch Big Brother (which was invented by the Dutch, btw), but we will be blamed.

Long term expats living in England get used to this, generally allowing the stars-and-stripes bashing to roll away like rain off the back of the Queen’s swans, but there are times we get pushed to the limit. Halloween is one of them.

Let’s get this clear, Brits. We did NOT force you to embrace Halloween. You did it all by yourself. Nor did we invent it. I understand your disgruntlement, but do not shift the blame. Accept responsibility for the choices you have made and, perhaps, work to improve things.

Let’s look at the arguments against you.

WHERE’S THE GUY?
Bonfire Night was a glorious, and uniquely British, festival. I remember going to a magnificent party in the village of Hartley Witney my first year working here (1994). Locals had been stacking wood on the village green for a month; the pile was bigger than a 4-bedroom detached home. It was studded with “Guys” ... no longer representations of Guy Fawkes himself, but witty takes on authority figures who needed to be knocked down a peg or two, from an irritating French trade minister with beret and garlic strand to an insufferably smug pop star. As night fell, villagers slowly emerged from the adjoining woodland, swinging balls of fire on chains. When they reached the pyre they processed around it slowly , whirling the fireballs above their heads before launching them onto the waiting pile with its crowd of effigies. It felt deliciously ancient and pagan, despite the ceremony’s roots in hard-line Protestantism.

The ensuing inferno was the biggest I’d ever been near, raising the temperature across the whole green. We ate baked potatoes and drank numerous pints from the two local pubs, who had extended operations to the fireside.

There were no trick-or-treaters that year, nor for the rest of the ‘90s. But even then, I could feel Guy Fawkes Night fading. The English are often shockingly ignorant of their history: people in our office pointed “foreigners” at me to explain the significance of the celebration because they weren’t quite sure. (On 5 November 1605, a plot by Roman Catholic extremists to blow up parliament was narrowly foiled; they were executed and thereafter burned in effigy on the anniversary, along with other symbols of Popery, to celebrate the triumph of local authority over foreign influence. There were more significant plotters, but Fawkes was the one found with the gunpowder so became the poster child for the event.) For many, by the mid-1990s the stories and relevance had faded away until it was just a bonfire and some fireworks. 

Even more, I blame government. Between European air quality regulations and local government health and safety, it became almost impossible for local parishes to host their own celebrations. And in an era of hyper-sensitivity, the idea of burning anyone in effigy ... even with humorous intent ... has become a no-go area.

A few particularly famous local festivals remain, notably in Lewes and Ottery-St-Mary, but in many places events have become large, almost-industrial fireworks displays without any historic tradition or local flare. Parents and children are simply often finding local trick or treating to be more fun than the soulless municipal Bonfire Nights that are left in most of the country.

NOT A “HALLMARK HOLIDAY"
American capitalists did not invent Halloween to “force” you to buy greeting cards, home decorations and candy. It was your festival a millennium before the USA even existed. Look up Samhain. The Christians appropriated festivities with the double feast of All Souls on the 31st and All Saints on 1 November, beloved celebrations marked throughout Britain for centuries before the Puritans went into abolition overdrive.

Guy Fawkes celebrations, in fact, were promoted by Cromwell’s administration as a way to replace Halloween in the people’s affections. So, rather than adopting something new from America, today's Brits who celebrate Halloween are returning to their original tradition. Got it?

YOU’RE MISSING SOME KEY POINTS

Sure, there’s an unhealthy element of gluttony to Halloween. In my experience, English kids have quickly embraced the get-as-much-candy-as-possible part of the event while missing all the nuance.

First. It’s Trick or Treat. Where’s your trick? American kids know they need to earn their goodies, from telling simple jokes to putting on mini-plays on the doorstep. Many homeowners buy a range of sweets, holding back “the good stuff” for kids with the best trick or the cleverest costume. English kids don’t get this at all.

There’s no sense of working for their treat: they just want candy. They’re totally missing Halloween’s most valuable life lesson.

The trick element also builds confidence. Most Brits will grudgingly acknowledge that Americans are naturally better and more confident presenters than they are. Look to early doorstep candy canvassing for one of the reasons.

The English kids at my door also show shockingly little attention to costume. It’s inevitably a procession of the same mass-produced tat grabbed at the local supermarkets. Meanwhile, American kids may spend weeks planning; often in a great bonding exercise with their parents and exploring their creativity. Costumes are often home made; having the same outfit as someone else is abhorrent. Last year, I think my godson had the only hand-crafted costume amongst the hundreds of kids haunting our housing estate. Which is a nice cue to run that adorable photo again...

Costumes span all of imagination and are often quite clever. Halloween is where many American kids are introduced to current events and political satire. A fair number of Supreme Court justices showed up on friends’ Facebook feeds last year. Groups will organise team costumes. In Texas I remember a bunch of kids dressed as different fish, with their parents holding the frame of the aquarium. In Chicago, a set of cardboard boxes painted as buildings that turned into the city skyline when the kids stood in the right order. It’s also a great way to learn history. Since Hamilton, American doorsteps have seen a surge in founding fathers, many of whom will rap for you.

Oh, what I would give this year to see a WW1 soldier, a suffragette, a Russian with a Salisbury guidebook or a May-Corbyn Punch-n-Judy Show. Sadly, we can confidently expect the same repetitive stream of Sainsbury's vampire & witch costumes.

AND YOU’RE IGNORING SOME BENEFITS
When you get past the candy, you’ll see that there are some fabulous benefits to Halloween. If done properly, as described above, the annual outing builds creativity and self confidence. Costumed roll play fosters imagination. Parents and children work together on a shared project.

Even if you miss all of this, there’s still an element of communal fun that’s rare in modern life. In my Hampshire neighbourhood (see below), groups of parents go out with the kids, talking to each other and making community connections often missing in an English housing estate. People share photos of best decorated houses and cute kids on the local Facebook page. It’s one of the few things that’s managed to give our neighbourhood, full of commuters who spend most of their waking hours elsewhere, a community spirit more like an old, established village.

Even sugar-fuelled greed has its upside. The desire to milk my childhood subdivision for all the candy possible taught me early lessons in project planning , team management and map reading. 

AMERICANS DIDN’T COME TO EUROPE FOR AMERICANA
Yes, I’m excited that the MLB is bringing a few baseball games to London next year. Sometimes I feel the need to drop in to the Fat Bear for some home style cooking. Amazon delivery is a life-saver.

But on the whole, Americans in Europe want ... Europe. In France, we want to sit under the lime trees drinking Pastis and watching the locals play Pétanque. In Spain we want to see villagers parading flower-draped statues of saints. We thirst for locally-brewed beer in Munich gardens and shop for exquisite handicrafts in tiny Italian shops. If I wanted to drink Bud and shop at Wal-Mart, I could have stayed home. Offer most Americans in Britain the choice between that magical Hartley Whitney bonfire night and Halloween, and they’d take the former. It’s not our fault that the choice doesn’t exist any more.

Have I made my point? Good. If you’re still wound up about the incursion of this rubbish American event into your national traditions, then DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT. Go to your local council and volunteer to organise your Guy Fawkes celebrations.

I, meanwhile, will be polishing my arguments for why Black Friday is not our fault, either.

Re-opened London Mithraeum underwhelms despite investment

No major construction project gets planning permission in the UK these days without an element of quid pro quo.

Our house builder won the right to lay suburbia over farmland with a snazzy new community centre. Earlier this year, I wrote of how London’s newest theatre was the by-product of a recent luxury Thames-side development. Now we get London’s newest heritage attraction as a consequence of Bloomberg’s impressive new corporate headquarters.

The Foster and Partners-designed building in the heart of the City of London has been showered with press attention, was the darling of London Open House weekend 2019 and just snagged the prestigious Royal Institute of British Architects’ Stirling Prize for best new building of the year. I wish I could say I was as impressed by the re-instatement of London’s mithraeum (an ancient Roman temple of the god Mithras) in its basement. Bloomberg's restoration and re-siting of the temple to its original location, surrounded by a new, small museum with free public entry, was the price for planning permission of the building above. While the new installation is far better than the open-air, back-alley site it had been mouldering in for decades, the experience didn’t live up to the slick marketing Bloomberg has been putting out about it.

In addition to a too-successful PR team, this may, in large part, be due to a combination of the people working there and poor design of the experience. I suspect the 20-somethings who welcomed us were recent graduates on rotation through the marketing department. They seemed to know little about Romans, Mithras or the temple, and had a remarkably laid back attitude to the whole thing. “Here’s the layout, explore what you want, the next show is in 5 minutes.”

At that, we rushed directly down to the temple itself, past other displays on two floors. Heavy use of the words “show” and “multi-media experience” had prepared us for something special. The newly-restored foundations do look good on first glance, with clumsy modern additions stripped out and a full-scale glass representation of Mithras slaying a bull where it would once have been on the altar. Promising. Lights went down. Some mist came up. A high-quality, “total surround” sound system gave us the audio effects of a ceremony, then the following banquet. And then the lights came up.

We were puzzled. That felt like a teaser. Where was the main event? It was back in the rooms we’d rushed through to get to the “show”, we later discovered.

The whole experience would be more meaningful if it if it worked more like a ride at Disney’s Epcot Center, with a gated flow from one section to another, learning about what you're about to see. Let the tension and the excitement build. So that when you get to the temple, you know what you're looking at and are better able to engage your imagination.  I suspect that’s how it was designed, but the youngsters on the door .... by rushing you straight to the end ... didn’t deliver. So let’s spool back and consider the experience again.

You arrive at a dedicated door into a big, empty room decorated with modern, but Roman inspired, floor-to-ceiling wall murals. The long-time marketer in me sees this for what it no doubt is: a corporate entertainment space. (And why not? If you’ve got a Roman temple in your basement, incorporating it into client cocktail parties makes sense.).

But instead of letting you pass straight through this cavernous echo chamber, the youngsters on the door could give an inspiring little intro to what you’re about to see and why it’s special. They could explain the murals that celebrate with photo-realistic detail the influence Roman architecture has had on London to this day. They don’t necessarily need to be in period costume but ... why not? The cult of Mithras was primarily adopted by the army. A centurion complete with plumed helmet, introducing himself as Ulpius Silvanus, donor of the building, would have been a great touch.

Most of all, they should stop you by the case of artefacts at the top of the stairs, all unearthed in recent excavations as they prepared foundations for the new building, and explain why they’re special. The showiest finds from the temple are across town at the Museum of London. This looks like a case of seemingly inconsequential household ephemera. While you can find the information in the guide book to explain its importance (the temple was next to a river; lots of stuff washed downstream; thus the latest excavations told us more about life in the whole city), the experience would be better if someone took the time to explain it live.

From here you climb down a long flight of stairs to reach the street level of Roman London. It looks like a staircase in a sleek corporate office building. Which, of course, it is. With some music, lighting effects and information on the walls they could have given more of a sense of time travel, plunging down into history. (Only after I left did I learn that there were historic street levels noted on the walls; they are so subtle and the lighting is so low we missed them.)

You emerge into an ante-chamber where the meat of the information about the temple is conveyed. For the temple to make sense, you need to spend some time here. This is the best designed of the rooms, with video projections on the walls setting a nicely-mystical atmosphere while telling the story of the temple. The audio feed is a documentary hosted by Joanna Lumley, including various experts on the site and Mithras. Information screens on plinths let you browse through a catalogue of artefacts found here and moved to the Museum of London, photos of the original excavation, reconstructions of what the temple and its surrounding neighbourhood would have looked like, etc. Once armed with all this information, you'll have a much better idea of what you're looking at and be far more impressed at how it's come to be here.

Another rather industrial hallway takes you to the temple entrance. Not for the first time, my mind turned wistfully to the Danish museums at Jelling and Moesgaard, with their remarkable ability to use multi-media technology to bring history to life. They, doubtless, would have found a way to make this hall look like the banks of the Wallbrook, and would have given us a sense of the half-submerged, grotto-like set-up of the temple. Like all Mithraea, this one was at least partially underground to evoke a cave that's central to Mithras' story.

If you've taken the time to pay attention to the artefacts and information before this point, then the short sound and light experience at the temple makes more sense. There's only one source for what might have happened here (a 4th century Egyptian papyrus), so the fact that you're essentially eavesdropping on the original Latin ceremony is rather cool. Still, I wanted more. Instead of reconstructing the temple on the computer screens outside, why not project walls and people against the mist to bring it all to life in situ?

Big picture: the London Mithraeum is surprisingly old school for a brand new cultural experience. The Danish museums mentioned above, the Dutch National Maritime Museum and England's own Mary Rose Museum are all great examples of people using technology to bring history to life and make artefacts more relevant. The Mithraeum could have so easily been the same. Sure, it's the quid pro quo afterthought to the building above, and it's free, so perhaps we shouldn't expect much. But given that the whole site cost £1 billion, has state-of-the-art environmental systems and is sheathed in 600 tonnes of bronze imported from Japan, a bit more investment in user experience doesn't seem like a big ask. As it is, I can't see many beyond true devotees of ancient Roman history getting too excited about this.

Why should an insignificant temple to a niche god be worth your time, anyway? Because Mithras has a direct connection to our world today. In the first century, jaded Romans bored with their state religion were dabbling in new "mystery cults". Three gods were running neck-and-neck for dominance on this scene: Mithras, Isis and Jesus. How the followers of the latter won the race, consigning the others to footnotes in history (while borrowing attributes of their worship) is not only relevant to anyone interested in Christianity today, but gives fascinating insight into why organisations succeed and fail. There's an intriguing theory that Mithraism, by being a cult limited to men and mostly confined to the military, put itself out of business with its exclusivity. While Christianity, by not only targeting but encouraging women and slaves amongst its early followers, hit upon a winning bottom-up growth strategy.

This is, sadly, not something you'll learn much about when you visit the London Mithraeum. But maybe it's enough to tempt you to check it out. If you're in the area, it's certainly worth half an hour of your time to take advantage of a free ticket. You will need to get one in advance: book here to do so.

Brownsea is a safe haven for more than just red squirrels

Most people know the stories of how vast numbers of native Americans died in the early days of European exploration as they encountered for the first time, and were defenceless against, diseases brought by the newcomers. We don't hear so much about biological disasters coming the other way across the Atlantic, but they happened. It's how most of England ended without its native squirrel.

The distinctive red creature, with its tufted ears, intelligent eyes and diminutive frame, is today more familiar from Beatrix Potter illustrations than live observation. That's thanks to imported American grey squirrels who, in less than a century, spread from a curiousity in one aristocratic park to the dominant breed scrambling through trees across the country. I'd always assumed it was because the immigrant grays, who are three times the size of the reds, either killed their hosting cousins or stole their food. It turns out there was no rodent genocide. The grays simply carried a disease that doesn't bother them, but quickly wiped out the reds.

My fresh awareness is thanks to a guided squirrel walk on Brownsea Island, one of the last refuges of the native animal. We'd decided on the National Trust property in Poole Harbour as something new and different to do on a gorgeous autumn day before my visiting father headed back to the States. Expecting little, we were blown away ... not just by the squirrels but by the secret garden quality of the whole island and the unexpectedly magnificent sweep of Poole Harbour.

The communities around the harbour host some of Britain's priciest real estate, and one look at the view on a fine day makes it obvious why. This is the second-biggest natural harbour in the world after Sydney, but it's surprisingly devoid of commercial shipping or large buildings. None of the ports in the harbour are big enough to host cruise ships. Instead, this massive stretch of water ... an inland lake but for a narrow mouth opening onto the Solent ... is populated by pleasure craft, yachts and an archipelago of small, mostly privately-owned islands. The shores to the north and east are fringed with charming small towns (Poole foremost amongst them), sleek blocks of modern flats and mansions torn from the pages of architectural magazines. To the west, the Dorset hills fill the horizon, still the wild, green expanses of Thomas Hardy novels. It's spectacular.

Poole is a pleasant place to poke around in, with a higher-than-average number of independently owned boutiques and restaurants thanks, no doubt, to the higher-than-average income of local residents. If you're making for Brownsea, it's notable as being the main departure point for the harbour ferries that will get you there. (You can also depart from Sandbanks, but it's further from the motorways you'll probably use to get here.) There's plenty of room in a multi-story car park to abandon your vehicle for the day, but drivers of larger models should proceed with extreme caution. This is a vintage facility from the era when Brits drove tiny cars; every column and tight ramp entry is marked with the paint of vehicles that didn't judge the tight spaces correctly. Including mine.

Try to get here by noon so you can grab lunch in one of the restaurants along the High Street. There is a National Trust cafe on the island but the selection is very limited.  Alternatively, pack a lunch and take advantage of the island's abundance of gorgeous picnic spots. The ferry costs £11.50 and is not part of island admission, so even National Trust members need to pay up. It goes direct from Poole Harbour to Brownsea, which is a quick 10- to 15-minute hop. On the way back, however, you'll continue on a clockwise circumnavigation of the harbour with some informative commentary, so it's a pleasure cruise as much as practical transport.

A Victorian faux-castle and a range of suitably baronial outbuildings welcomes you as you arrive on the island, but they're some of the only signs of "civilisation". The castle is a private retreat run by the John Lewis partnership for its employees. The National Trust cafe occupies the old stable and some waterside lawns with spectacular views. Other outbuildings house a small gift shop and a couple of holiday cottages. Beyond is 500 acres of woodland, lawns, heath, salt marsh and cliff walks. At just 1.5 miles long and 3/4 mile wide, it's small enough to cover in a day but big enough to offer variety and ... at least on a weekday in October ... to find yourself alone in glorious woodland solitude.

With its salt marshes, Brownsea is a haven for bird watchers. It's also a sacred spot for the Boy Scouts because Baden Powell started the organisation with camping trips here. Scouts still regularly come to stay. But it's the red squirrels that draw most of the crowds. Though visitors should be aware that it's possible, and even common, to spend a day here without seeing any. Red squirrels are small (about seven inches tall without their tail and weighing in at about 10 ounces), fast and reclusive. Fortunately, the National Trust offers daily squirrel safaris with knowledgeable guides who will take you to the spots where you're most likely to catch a glimpse of one of the 200-strong population. By pure circumstance we ended up on the island in peak squirrel-spotting season, when the population is hard at work finding and caching nuts for the winter. We saw five on the group walk, then I returned on my own to commune with a few more.

A stand of beech, hazel and pine forest behind the island's church was the week's hot spot. It's woodland from a fairy tale, dense enough to provide shade and a springy carpet of loam, but well-spread enough to allow glimpses of dappled sunshine and long views through tree trunks to distant clearings. I perched on a log and opened my ears as well as my eyes; you can hear the squirrels scampering through the leaves before you spot them. There was a magical moment when one paused atop a fallen trunk less than 6 feet from me and looked me straight in the eye, but I can't prove it. By the time I raised my camera, he was gone.

We wandered around the island for a couple of hours. With warm summer weather, well provisioned and with a good book, you could lounge here for hours. It's not just a refuge for squirrels. If you want to disconnect from the modern pressures for a bit, this haven feels much further away from the "real world" than a 15-minute boat ride.