Ahh, Halloween.

A night for Children and Extroverts, neither of which are me.

However, the love of my life and soon-to-be wife adores it as much as I adore Christmas, and so it is my husbandly duty to fall in line, swallow my gut instinct to hide on the sofa all night with my cats, and instead get dressed up and go paint the town red, or something.

I was frustratingly indifferent, I'm sure, finding it particularly hard to get any inspiration for costume ideas. At one point I almost decided to go with an olde English Knight, but nothing really made my eyes sparkle. What can I say, I'm just not a fun guy. (in hindsight, a fungi would have been pretty funky).

Thought all my friends in the past made the effort to celebrate this day by dressing up and... doing whatever, I spent my entire life after the age of about 9 acting like it didn't exist, alongside Valentines day.

But, in recent years, as my friend circle shrank and those who remained all enjoyed this extrovert's opportunity to prove how funny or interesting they are, I have been captured in at least a walkabout with minimum effort gear (a black gown and a mask kinda thing).

The game was upped by a factor of 10 when she came into my life.

At first, I was super eager to please in my own introverted way. I went to her apartment she lived in at the time while she was still at work and secretly decorated the place into a horror house, with about 30 pairs of haloween socks that I myself still wear to this day two years later. I can't seem to get rid of them, they've certainly multiplied.

We also dressed up full force, myself as The Data from Star Trek version of Sherlock Holms after half his face had been surgically replaced with living tissue - hyper obscure, I know. And she as... well, whatever this freakshow is:

In our second year, I hosted my first ever house party of a kind, where I built a murder mystery game based on one of those free online ones, which was an oddly successful night where I was dressed as Ranni the Witch from Elden Ring. We made Bloody Marys and pumpkin pasta puking out of a pumpkin, with witch fingers in cages, demon-red lights setting the mood through cobweb-laden ceilings.

This was the kind of 'old people' party that I've come to enjoy, you know, now I'm legit 'old' (closer to 40 than 30, jesus). They are at home, and involve no such effort to be attractive or cool, no shitty loud music I have to secretly hate but outwardly say 'banging tunes bro!' or whatever. I don't have to bump into people I know and loath from work or something and end up talking about work gossip, and I don't need to over-drink for the express purpose of getting wasted enough that I no longer feel socially uncomfortable.

Instead I can chill with close friends, drink things that I actually enjoy the taste of, have some creepy background music and constant laughs from creative and weird humour that all my close friends are built upon.

Well, my friends started dwindling further as Covid restrictions took its toll in China and everyone decided it was no longer worth it being here. Can't blame 'em. So this halloween, it was just me and the fiance on a night out.

Since I failed to come up with anything inspiring, she did instead, and came up with the concept of a 'white widow' - her - and its webbed victim - me. She was a portmanteau of a mourning widow and a spider (there's a giant white spider on her back), while I was wrapped up in webs and poisoned like Frodo in the warm embrace of Shelob when separated from Samwise Gamgee.

Here's me definitely enjoying the whole makeup proces:

I think it was a pretty great idea, especially comapred to any of mine. We were originally going to attempt to enter a competition with a 10,000yuan reward ($1,400), but the crowds were insane and the competitors were even more insane, nothing we could possibly compete with.

So we went to our second stop, a kind of night haloween party market where some friends were hosting a beer stall. There was a mini cinema set up with beds showing various horror movies such as Shining, and some seriously impressive and cool costumes.

That being said, we were shockingly a centre of attention to so many. There was a significant period where I felt like I became one of those celebrity wax models, as we had to pose for one photo with some random passer-by, followed immediately by another, and another, and another... the longer we stood there having photos taken, the more time the people coming our way had to queue up for their own!

It was a stern reminder of the horrors of becoming a celebrity... but just one night was kinda fun.

After a while I really needed to pee and realised to my horror there was no mechanism in my gear to make that even remotely possible. In the end I had to strip down to the knees in the darkness of a public park to let it all out!

Pretty normal in China, tbh.

Anyway, a job well done, we headed home and continued our halloween themed lifestyle of playing Resident Evil 7 together, watching horror movies (I've got Saw X downloaded, no idea how shitty that's gonna be) and living in devil-red lighting and spider webs.

Next up - MY TURN! Christmas trees and Mulled Wine!

Can't wait.