In a bookshop last week with my nine-year-old son, we stopped to look at a little model house kit. My eyes lit up as I told him that this was exactly the kind of thing I used to love doing when I was his age, and how I would spend hours making tiny things with tiny details. I once made a pair of perfect, miniature curtains for a dolls’ house, and every teddy bear within cuddling distance had a diminutive waistcoat made by me out of an odd sock.
“Why don’t you still do things like that?” he asked, and I replied without hesitation: “Because I grew up,” immediately struck by the sadness of my automatic response.
There are many things we give up because life beats the fun out of us, or y’know, we now have to use that time to make money, cook dinners, wash clothes or pick up small people from the fun interests they can then give up in a decade or two.
Dancing, singing, sports, making tiny curtains; the things that once filled us with joy often slowly ebb away until we don’t notice they’ve disappeared altogether, life passes, and then at 70, we’re encouraged to take up youthful, diverting activities to keep our brains active and stave off old age. Surely there’s a balance to be found in all the years in between.
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There is, however, an exception, one youthful pursuit that I would be happy to see consigned to childhood, and as this time of year rolls around, it’s unavoidable. Fancy dress. Adorable on wide-eyed children, giddy with delight at their fire-retardant, imminent-landfill wizard costumes and permission to flout the most fundamental parental rules about accepting sweets from strangers; but not so adorable, bordering on aggravating, on an adult.
“But it’s funny!” I hear you cry. Lots of things are funny, but fancy dress is to humour what Donald Trump is to empathy, and the Venn diagram of adults who enjoy dressing up in costume is two standalone circles. There is no overlap.
One Halloween, I sat on a couch, my tear-stained face almost obscured by the giant hooped trousers rising to meet it, while my classmates danced to 1990s tunes in black jeans and cute dresses
What a killjoy, sure where’s the harm, but there is always a reason behind a dislike as visceral as mine.
At the impressionable, vulnerable age of 15, I was invited to a fancy dress Halloween party, the awkward first time we’d dressed up since becoming teenagers, and everyone was nervous about getting it right. Determined to eschew the amaranthine female trend of dressing as something sexy, or a sexy interpretation of something distinctly unsexy (the fourth wave of feminism has yet to dampen this, and you haven’t lived until you’ve seen a 40-year-old woman dressed as a provocative pumpkin), I decided to make an elaborate clown costume.
As you know from the tiny curtains, dear reader, I was a dab hand with a sewing machine, and made a pair of giant trousers with a hula hoop for a waistband, attaching it to a billowy shirt for a barrel effect, so that I looked like one of those huge inflatables you might see outside a second-hand car dealership. It was so large it arrived at the party five minutes before I did, and as I turned to wave to my dad as he drove away, the front door opened, my friend appeared in a little black dress accented with orange gloves, looked at me aghast, turned her head and shouted, “Guys! Who was supposed to call Maia??”
It transpired that the overwhelming self-doubt of our years meant the theme had been changed to simply wearing black and orange, but in those pre-mobile days, everyone had thought someone else had called to tell me. You’ll never hear me enthuse about a WhatsApp group these days, but what I wouldn’t have given for one back then.
And so it came to pass that one Halloween, I sat on a couch, my tear-stained face almost obscured by the giant hooped trousers rising to meet it, while my classmates danced to 1990s tunes in black jeans and cute dresses. Had I been a different child, it could have been an origin story worthy of the Joker.
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As I walked down a busy Dublin street this week, I saw a group of friends leaving a pub, laughing and joking in fancy dress, looking like a charity shop window dropped into a hall of mirrors, and at the next corner, a drunken Dumbledore, curry sauce splashed down his cloak, accidentally knocking a pumpkin off a gatepost as he tried to subtly relieve himself behind a wall, and there was no pang of envy or wistfulness. I felt nothing but relief that I’m firmly in that other, non-wacky circle of the Venn diagram.
I bought the little model house kit. We shouldn’t wait until we’re retired and advised by geriatric health workers to take up something we once loved. We need to fight harder to avoid the trap of growing up. Make a jigsaw, bake some cakes, go dancing, join a walking group, make a tiny pair of curtains for no practical reason; but, for the love of God, step away from the fancy dress box.
