This is out last night in the US, where we’ve been for two weeks now, visiting Sarah’s folks.
The days have been punctuated by the excellent Intelligentsia coffee and sandwiches of The Edge, shopping for cheap(er) clothes, and the wearying omnipresence of the two big presidential candidates on the television.
Eloïse has been having a whale of a time with Oma and Opa; Lucas has simply been smiling at everyone, winning hearts and minds, as he is wont to do.
Last night was Halloween, an occasion that is taken quite seriously in this country. It’s a deeply rooted element of American culture and so we took Eloïse on her first American trick-or-treating this evening.
Basically, this involves dressing up in fancy dress and knocking on doors, at which point Eloïse asks, “Trick or treat?”, in a suitably ominous tone. I have a strong association of Halloween with a supernatural theme, but children dress up in all kinds of fancy dress here. Eloïse, for example, was in a mouse costume.
By the end of the evening, she’d collected a lot of sweets and was feeling very pleased with herself. We only let her eat a single piece of it when she got home, but she seemed happy with that.
This evening, I went out with Sarah’s brother, John, and his new girlfriend, Katie, and we drove to Worcester in the neighbouring state of Massachusetts, where the Sisters of Mercy were playing at the Palladium.
This incarnation of the Sisters isn’t my favourite, I have to say. The delicacies of songs like Marian are lost in the faster tempo, the lack of a twelve string and the use of chunky guitars instead of an ebow. The sound in general wasn’t great, with some songs becoming recognisable only after half a minute or so, which is a bit strange for tracks I’ve been playing for a quarter of a century. The original sound isn’t even approximated for most songs. I also lament the lack of a human bass player.
Anyway, tomorrow evening, we fly home to Amsterdam, arriving Monday morning.