Halloween is big round here. It’s weirdly big in much of America, I understand, and I’ve never done a state-by-state comparison, or really researched the subject very intensely, but from that position of expertise, I can state clearly and authoritatively that San Francisco is the most ridiculously Halloweenny place in the whole world.

It’s not just the decorating of houses, gardens and windows - inside and out, there are orange and black decorations that hit the shops sometime in August, alongside the ‘Back to school’ things, all fangs and claws and cheap sweets and all those kinds of things.

And costumes. Oh so many costumes. Where in the UK most costumes tend to be ghoulish or in some way morbid - at least traditionally, here they appear to be wish-fulfillment or just costumes for the sake of it - a giant cavalcade where people get to dress up like they wouldn’t dare to the rest of the year. And boy do they seize the opportunity - with both hands, and a leg lock and a mouth full of hair, do they seize it. They seize it hard.

And the pattern seems to follow the usual when grown up people are allowed to dress up in costumes, the normal thing: men are superheroes, celebrities, animals, fictional characters, inanimate objects. For women, the main costume appears to be a variation on ’slutty’. Slutty nurse, slutty cat, slutty firefighter, slutty bee. If you can take a costume, reduce the skirt to something resembling a belt, squeeze the top into something resembling a very small fruitbowl filled with over-ripe melons, then you have the perfect female halloween costume.

Then there are just random ones, ones that COULD be a vampire, or a robot, or a character from a popular American TV show of yore that I’ve never heard of. And they wander the streets, NOT just on the night of halloween itself, but during the day of it as well, and, in some cases, at the end of the week adjoining halloween because they’ve been wearing their costume to work as well. To their job. Their proper, grown-up, real live job.

Last week on the bus home one day there was a Luigi (from Super Mario), a vampire, a robot, a slutty something, and a woman wearing a white cardigan and jeans and carrying a Storm Trooper helmet, which frankly isn’t trying hard enough.

And there were several others, but the great thing about San Francisco is that the coming of Halloween affords the opportunity to play an unending game of ‘Halloween Costume or Everyday Wear?’ Because any day of the year, rugged individualism thrives in the San Francisco dress sense, and you stop noticing it so much until you try and work out whether people are dressed funny for the occasion, or just because that’s what they always wear.

“Halloween costume or Every day?” we hiss at each other, walking down the road and spotting a gentleman dressed like a particularly unconvincing version of Amy Winehouse. “I say Halloween”.

“Actually no” comes the reply “I saw him in Safeway last week”.

“Halloween or Every day?” we hiss, seeing a woman dressed in bright yellow shiny trousers, a tight black top, yellow cropped leather jacket and with yellow threaded through tiny plaits in her hair.

“It’s so hard to tell, I mean, that’s a great deal of pain and time, putting that yellow through your hair. But what IS she if it’s halloween costume?”
“Toxic waste? Or a bee”
“Toxic bee”
“Should we ask her?”
“Hell, no”

Because that’s the problem. It would be one of the best internet games ever. Look at the picture, click on the button saying whether it’s a halloween costume or just every day wear… But the problem is that the person setting up the quiz has to know, in advance, which one it’s supposed to be.

And you know the problem with that: that the only way of knowing for sure is to ask the person.
Can you imagine actually doing this?

“Hello, I was just admiring your costume”
“What costume?”
“Erk.”

“Hello, are you on your way out to a costume party?”
“No, I am just a common-or-garden nutter, please hold still while I stab you with this sharpened spoon”
“Erk.”

“What a great normal everyday outfit one might wear to work, do you know where I can get one just like it?”
“Are you stupid? I am clearly dressed as the ghost of Sarah Palin’s political career, do you think I would wear this by choice, what’s wrong with you?”
“erk.”

“That’s a particularly outrageous slutty nurse outfit, you basically look like a medical prostitute! Did you hire that from the costume shop down the road?”
“No, I’m just a nurse, I’m on my way home from work. Wait here while I get my actually-a-firefighter boyfriend to come and beat you up”
“Erk.”

Etc.

Never mind. It was a good idea in theory.