Melanie McDonagh

Those of us who grew up with a traditional Halloween, that is to say, in Ireland, don’t have much truck with the contemporary version. The pumpkin-coloured, gore and chocolate fest that has come to Britain via the US is gross by comparison; we had a simple version. We dressed up, but in masks and any old clothes we could lay our hands on. We had nuts and apples for bobbing, not chocolate in the shape of severed fingers. We went from house to house looking for a penny for the bobbin’, not trick or treating. And the thing you really looked forward to was barm brack. Halloween was a time for ghosts, not chainsaw massacres It’s actually a fruited, not too sweet yeast loaf, which is really good buttered, and if a bit stale, toasted and buttered.

Sir Ranulph Fiennes (a third cousin of Ralph, since you ask) has written a book about Lawrence of Arabia. He feels an affinity with him: he too has led Arabs in fighting, in Sir Ranulph’s case, for the Sultan of Oman. ‘I’d been in Arabia, leading Arabs against the Marxist rebels. In Lawrence’s day, the British were fighting the Germans and the Turks’.   ‘It’s my DNA. My ancestors did lots of travel in new places’ The circumstances differed. ‘Lawrence had camels and was dealing with a huge body of men; I had six open-topped Land Rovers with two machine guns and I led 30 men; a mixture of Belushis and Oman Arabs and Zanzibars. I felt about the men as a family.’ What does he make of Lawrence’s extraordinary career? ‘It mystified me’, he says.

Happy Birthday, Disney. A hundred years ago today, Walt and his brother Roy formed the Disney Brothers’ Studio to produce a series of short films based on Alice in Wonderland, a successor to Walt’s original Laugh-O-Gram studio. It helped shape the American imagination and transformed the art of animation. If you meet anyone who actually saw the original Snow White in the cinema – as the late Stewart Steven told me – you’ll find they recall being scared out of their wits by the scene where Snow White runs through the forest with eyes and groping hands following her. Actually, there’s an awful lot to scare the viewer in Snow White. And no one has ever bettered ‘Hi Ho, Hi Ho’, as an animation melody.

A friend from Lewisham, south London, reports occasionally on her children’s state school, which has a reputation for being strife- and strike-prone. However, the children themselves – nursery and reception – are engaged in more calming activities. They are doing mindfulness. ‘My son loves it,’ she says. They sit down cross-legged at least once a week to take in the sounds around them (‘listen to the birds!’), concentrate on their breathing and focus on the present moment. My friend did ask the teachers whether it was possible to get five-year-olds to sit still for that long. ‘Yes,’ she was told. ‘In fact, some fall asleep.

It is, I know, a bit early to be thinking about 2024, but to help with the forward planning, here’s a film to avoid next year: the Disney release of its new, non-animated, musical version of Snow White. The original animated version of 1937 was a classic if ever there were one. Stewart Steven, the late editor of the Evening Standard, remembered seeing it as a boy when it was released: ‘I was completely terrified’, he told me, speaking for a generation of children. It was a triumph of animation; the songs were terrific – the seven dwarves’ ‘Hi Ho, Hi Ho’ is immortal; and the episode where the princess, fleeing the huntsman through the trees, is tormented by clinging branches and malevolent eyes is fearful. It’s just a pity that most of us now see it on a small screen.