Halloween is approaching in the US….though I think that,mostly, people are the same everywhere, differences in customs do interest me. Here, the dust everywhere ensures that all too often, we have actual “websites” hanging greyly from various corners in our houses, and it is a chore to clean the cobwebs off…and in the US, in banks and offices and I don’t know how many homes, it is such an unknown entity that they actually use artificial webspray to create cobwebs to set the scene for Halloween decorations!

In the same way, when my daughter invited someone home for dinner, she came wearing a brooch in the shape and form of a lizard. To us, this is a sometimes-tolerated (it eats cockroaches) and sometimes-hated, but very common, domestic creature…we would not dream of wearing jewellery in its shape. Though one of the most popular of the very beautiful mud-sculptures in West Bengal when I grew up was an intensely realistic one of a lizard eating up a cockroach, I would never have actually bought one of those, either!

Makes me think, though…why would the shape of a cobra be so commonly used in jewellery when that, too, was quite common some decades ago? The ways of human beings are unendingly interesting!