Trick or treat? (Obligatory Halloween post)

I can't remember the age at which I stopped trick-or-treating.

I remember it was the same year that my brother stopped, even though he's three years younger than I am. It's also the same year that my parents stopped giving out sweets to trick-or-treaters. We used to turn of the lights and go to the cinema to get away from them.

We live in an area where it is not unusual to have your house egged if you ignore them, but it they seem to have gotten tamer in recent years and it seems to be an unwritten Halloween rule that if the lights are off they will assume that you're not in.

I lived in the same house for 15 years. Having studied memory, I know that that is as long as I can remember. We did live in a flat before that but I wasn't old enough at that time.

When you've been going trick-or-treating on the same street for at least a decade, you learn a little something about the people that live in the same place as you. You know which ones are 'never in', you know who gives the best sweets, who is likely to trick you, who will be dressed up as well, who will give you money and even the exact house that the old man who gives you the tangerine lives in. You know which houses have different people in from last year, who has a dog and who has kids and roughly how old they are.

I didn't realise until recently that you learn something about your neighbours on Halloween that you wouldn't learn any other time of the year. It also doesn't seem to be as useful as anything you would learn any other day of the year, but the point still stands.

The last year I went trick-or-treating I went with my best friend at the time in her estate rather than my own. It's a refreshing experience when you go trick-or-treating somewhere new, and you get all new sweets and new faces but I can't help but think back and think that I should have done my last round in my own street, for the memories more than anything else, but as is life.

This year I went out with my best friend. We dressed up (like the big kids that we are at heart), and we went out clubbing and got drunk in fancy dress. My skirt was so short she spent the entire night following me around pulling it down but overall the whole experience was good.

I don't know when the shift happened. Less than half a decade ago I was dressed as a much more innocent looking; last minute, makeshift zombie; with a different best friend asking strangers for sweets and we fast forward to the 18 year old me in the shortest skirt of my life and a pair of fishnet tights and high heeled boots (which did not last all night I will tell you now).

In Mean Girls, they say that 'Halloween is the one night a year when a girl can dress like a total slut and no other girls can say anything about it.' When does this occur? When do you stop seeing Halloween as a fun way to get free sweets and start seeing it as an 'excuse' to dress like a slut and get drunk?

I mean, from what I've seen, most people don't need an excuse.

I'm not going to go into if I think it is begging and if children should do it and some of the extreme measures I've seen mentioned regarding it (laxative chocolate so they won't call again next year) because I don't think it's worth the debate. For me Halloween has always been fun and I think that is what it will stay as.

My definition of fun has just changed considerably since I was 5.

Quitting

If you follow me on twitter (I'm surprised anyone follows me on twitter really, with the rubbish that I post) then this will be old news to you.

I mentioned in my first post that I was doing a sponsored swim and I even plugged my Just Giving page in an attempt to get anyone who is reading this to sponsor me.

This is no more.

I didn't receive any sponsors - on or offline - and when you're 4 weeks into a 12 week swim this is very disheartening. I have posted several plugs on my own twitter page, I had local radio DJs retweeting the link to my page and I asked people IRL (this means In Real Life for my mother) if they would like to sponsor me, with no luck whatsoever.

I spent almost £25 on three weeks of swimming while I was at home and I would have cost me another £170 for the college gym membership to carry on while I was here and if I wasn't raising anything more than what my family would have sponsored me towards the end, I didn't see the point. Some people will moan like "But now the charity isn't getting any money when they would have got at least some if you carried on!"

The point is that I don't see the sense in spending a lot of money for a tiny amount to be raised. There has been a negative impact there rather than a positive one. I feel really bad that I spent the £25 now that I could have donated, but I can now donate some of the rest of the money I would have spent to someone else doing something else or spend it setting up something else to raise money.

A friend of mine made a good point when I first started appealing for sponsors; I'm doing something that I've already done. I have done the sponsored channel swim before, I have a certificate to prove it. But I'm trying to raise money by doing the same thing - and it's obvious that it isn't working.

This is going to make my 'Raise £100 for charity' on my 365 days in 30 ways more difficult to do, but it also means I'll be more likely to stretch myself to do something better because I can't rely on this anymore.

I'm also going to have to work harder on 'Get back into my size 10 clothes', but it's probably a good idea that the list got a little more challenging.

I don't like quitting.

Lance Armstrong said: "Pain is temporary. It may last a minute, or an hour, or a day, or a year, but eventually it will subside and something else will take its place. If I quit, however, it lasts forever" and this really speaks to me.

But sometimes you have to know when it is the right time to quit. And as a fresher with a knee condition who has spent a fair amount of money raising no money so far; I think I have reached that point.