St. Germain-en-Laye:- Thursday, 24. October 1996:- In relation to GMT, two o'clock in the afternoon here, is about noon. For this late in October, it is very bright, very sunny and unseasonably warm. About a third of the place du Marché Neuf has been fenced off to the cars that normally park here on off-marché days, and strange goings-on are planned.

Some of the marché-shelters has been left in place and in the deep shade there are weird games set up on the trestle-tables. Games like 'hit the centre of the spider-web' or 'pin the nose on the witch' are featured. The people setting these up look like they've arrived too soon for carnival.

The whole set-aside space has been surrounded by portable barriers and it looks like some sort of stock pen, and there is a red and white plastic ribbon to keep the customers of the café under the arcades on the steps and off the place itself.

There is a table with about a dozen pumpkins right in front of the café at the bottom of the steps, just on the other side of the plastic tape. A technician is fiddling with a portable sound system, watched by the café customers.

A couple of witches and a balloon lady in yellow set up several rows of plastic chairs in front of the table with the pumpkins. A bus stops over on the right in front of the McDonald's and a horde of costumed little kids descend from it and are herded into the marché area. Another horde of larger costumed kids appears from the rue de Pologne and these too are herded through a slot in the barrier to the interior of the fenced-off area and all of them take seats in front of the pumpkin table.

The idea apparently is to give the local residents an idea of what Halloween is all about. Except for the patrons of the café and a number of policemen - and, I suppose, some sundry officials - plus a TV camera crew and a young photo lady from the town hall, the residents of this pleasantly small town west of Paris are doing what they usually do at this time of day - waiting at home for the afternoon opening of the shops.

There are kids' moms of course, with their cameras and their videos and there are the 'herders' - I guess they are the school teachers - but they might be volunteers. My rough guess puts the audience and the performers - the kids - at about even. There is a lot of empty marché to spare.

The kids are really enjoying themselves on this strange outing and the ones who have those full-face rubber masks take them off before they boil up inside, as does the French lady who tells everybody about the 'traditions' of Halloween. The kids scream at the orchestrated moments - and all yell 'Batman!' as the sound system plays the theme - and these are like 'free' screams; not like the ones they get told not to do - and I think I hear the lady somehow slip the word 'Irish' into the narrative and then I wish I'd been listening more closely.

Research reveals that Halloween is supposed to be a 'Christian' form of the Celtic Samhain, which is the beginning of the Celtic New Year. On the evening of this, apparently everything is up for grabs, even people's souls, which could be taken over by spirits who are ruled by witches. In a small fishing village in southern Ireland, horn-tooting young boys were led through the streets by the Lair Bhan who was dressed in a white sheet, wearing the skull of a horse. They visited the houses of the village, asking at each for money in the name of Muck Olla - a legendary very large but dead pig.

I never heard of any of this before and I doubt that Lair Bhan or Muck Olla were mentioned today while I was not paying attention; but I wonder what the 'pre-Christian' version might have been. No matter. I owe this information to the author, Malachi McCormick, who wrote it as an introduction to the recipe for making Barm Brack, in his book 'Irish Country Cooking.'

Meanwhile, at the place du Marché Neuf in St. Germain-en-Laye the kids have been divided into handy groups and given plastic sacks which they are allowed to fill with candy donated by local merchants - and they are allowed a few minutes to try their luck with the spider-web games - but it is all very orchestrated, the way they are marched around these corridors of barriers.

I see this and I know the reason for it and I know what happens when they get home and are with large people they are totally familiar with - they go stark raving crazy lunatic chaotic mad and demolish the furniture, smash the TV remote control to smithereens, tear pages out of all books not their own, paint indelible masterpieces on unwashable wallpaper and lose all their clothes, or at least, all of their right-foot socks.

The real reason for Halloween is to let them out at night on the last day of October, when it is cold and chilly and very dark, with masks on so they can hardly see anything - and tell them to go around to strangers' doors and ask for treats - candy in other words - and this is a truly scary thing to do and when they come back they are usually subdued for once and if they ate a lot of their booty along the way, later they will regret it, and there will be peace in the house for about a week.

In some places there used to be a lot of fireworks involved, so the little ones were given short chaperoned tours and then brought back to a safe basement where they could be safely blindfolded in order to pin tails on paper donkeys, or try to grab apples with their teeth out of tubs of water. The ones who were afraid to get their faces wet were given candy-apples and one bite out of a good one of these could give them lockjaw for at least half an hour.

In places where Halloween is a really big event, I read today that parents spend almost as much on it as they do for Christmas.

I think the French are really lucky not to know very much about these ancient 'Christian' customs and did not seem to be overly curious today. Still, there is a big Celtic part of France, and for all I know, the people who live there may be getting ready to spend the eve of Toussaint wandering around in the dark asking for money for the great dead pig, Muck Olla.