had an appropriately bizarre series of customers last night… to the point that the occasional customer who WASN’T in Halloween costume looked frankly weird.

Highlights of the festivities included:

* being reassured by an earnest and eloquent Frankenstein that his caped friend wouldn’t be sick… turned out that the cape was in fact a blanket from a volunteer paramedic, and the friend had left most of his evening expenditure in a bucket in the ambulance…

* two older witches with their partner wizards, walking up the drive of a private house… suddenly joined by a silent mass of fellow witches and wizards who were making their way up from the bus stop…

* a witch in a very short dress being boosted over a church wall… turned out that she didn’t have any knickers on :-&

* Fred Flintstone and a delightfully curvaceous Wilma, who I dropped off in fine fooling, and collected a few hours later… poor Wilma had overindulged and was feeling a bit queasy, while Fred patted her shoulder reassuringly…

* having my taxi chased by a blood-spattered man in a leather apron, much to the delight of his friends, all of whom turned out to be my customers. He then sat right behind me, and genuinely creeped me out without doing a thing…

* Seeing random lone zombies stumbling home, drunk enough to give a convincing impression that the city was being invaded by the undead…

* and finally… I pulled up at one club to discover that my customer was in a Nazi costume, complete with Swastika. The distaste on my face was evident. “Do I really have to pick YOU up?” I asked.

“You shouldn’t discriminate against people just because of how they look,” came the wonderful reply.

It transpired that he was quite a decent lad who abhorred everything that the Nazis stood for, and has chosen his costume as it represented, in his words, “the evil of all evils.”

We had a good chat about racism (which he had experienced) and gay rights, and about his costume. It turned out that he had hired the basic costume from a local shop, but that the Nazi embellishments had been made by his Mum. Really.

As I dropped him off and drove away, I was witness to the bizarre spectacle of a Second World War Nazi soldier bending down to tickle a little cat under the chin.

Happy Halloween!